


Masterplan

by Kantayra



Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [22]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Afterlife, Banter, Betrayal, Betrayal as Flirting, Bickering, Canon-Typical Terrible Fashion Decisions, Christmas Cards, Drama, F/M, Gift Giving, Gloating as Flirting, Happy Ending, Humor, Idiots in Love, Insecurity, Interludes from the Musical Cats, Love Confessions, M/M, Manipulation, Multi, Pears, Rassilon (Doctor Who) is a Dick, Reading the Manual, The Master Has Issues, The Master Steps on His Own Rake, Traps, Traps as Flirting, Whales, ascii art, extreme pettiness, gloating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28009080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kantayra/pseuds/Kantayra
Summary: Rassilon hath decreed: “Time Lords shall surrender their minds to the Matrix, for the benefit ofmeall!” Any predictions on how obedient the Doctors and the Masters are in surrendering? Go on, I’ll give youone guess.Ye Olde Epic Finale™ wherein Rassilon and the Master do battle for control of the Matrix, yet somehow the Doctor wins (as always) even though they’re not really in the running. Featuring: Excessive amounts of irreverence, Christmas gone horribly wrong, double-triple-quadruple-quintuple-sextuple betrayals, and hopefully some heart(s)felt moments along the way.
Relationships: Eighth Doctor/The Master (Macqueen), Fifth Doctor/The Master (Ainley), Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor (Academy Era)/The Master (Academy Era), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), The Lumiat/The Valeyard, The War Doctor/The War Master (Jacobi), Third Doctor/The Master (Delgado), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592659
Comments: 18
Kudos: 49





	1. The Siege

**Author's Note:**

> This is it! The finale that has been far too long in the making. Posting schedule will be Fridays & Tuesdays; there will be 4 chapters total, plus a little nonsense bit of epilogue that I'll post on Christmas Day, just to be thematic.
> 
> Also, I would like to point out that, when I first decided to write stories in this Matrix 'verse, one of the biggest appeals to me was that I could be lazy and not have to write long, plotty fics. As you read through the next 35K, I invite you to mock me for my hubris in thinking this. :)

High above the Doctor’s and Master’s mindscapes in the Matrix, out in the nether-regions of networks and data packets, one lone TARDIS orbited in a holding pattern. The doors to the police box were thrown open so that the adolescent Master could lie on his stomach on the floor right by the door, chin propped up on his elbows, and watch the scene below.

“This is _boring_!” the adolescent Doctor complained, over by the console. “I’ve got better things to do with my afterlife than fly around in circles all day.”

The adolescent Master raised an eyebrow and looked back over his shoulder at the Doctor. “Like what?”

The Doctor let out a frustrated breath, which blew back the fluffy hair that spilled over his forehead; he needed a haircut again. “I don’t know. Why don’t you pose as the goddess of some backward planet, and then I’ll turn up and expose you as a fraud, and then we can run away from the masses with pitchforks?”

“We already did that last century.” The Master snorted and looked back down. As he watched, several of him streaked back into his mindscape as biodata, running as if the devil was on their heels. “If you’re so bored, how about I tell you a story?”

The Doctor got a little chill. “This isn’t going to be one of those stories about Zagreus again?” he demanded. “I’m not _fifty_ anymore, you know; you can’t scare me.”

The Master considered. “Well, technically…”

“Oh, here we go!” the Doctor threw up his hands in disgust, but plopped down on the TARDIS floor beside the Master anyway. He never had been able to look away from a good horror story, despite his better judgement.

“Technically,” the Master said, “it’s about a vainglorious, domineering git. Might be Zagreus in some timelines and not in others: who knows?”

“It’s not you, is it?” the Doctor asked suspiciously.

The Master paused, as if the question had never occurred to him before and he had to consider the answer carefully. “Nah…” he finally concluded. “I have much better fashion sense.”

The Doctor coughed out a guffaw into his hand.

“This particular git,” the Master continued, “liked to call himself Rassilon, and he was the biggest git in all the Matrix. The Mindscape of Rassilon centred on the Throne of Rassilon beneath the Citadel of Rassilon in the City of Rassilon. There was probably even a Loo of Rassilon in there somewhere, for good measure. He had a serious fetish for eponymic genitive constructions, is my point.”

“No wait,” the Doctor said deadpan, “I think I might be able to guess who you’re talking about.”

“Will you stop interrupting?”

“No?”

“Ri-i-i-i-ight…” The Master rolled his eyes. “Being the biggest git in all the Matrix meant he could do loads of cool stuff that we really should be able to do instead, because we’d both find much more interesting uses for all of it. Rassilon – as a known git – only used it for killing people who disobeyed him.”

“How is that in any way different from what _you’d_ do if you could?”

“I’d only kill people in _funny_ ways,” the Master clarified. “Rassilon had a big, old stupid glove that he called…”

“The Glove of Rassilon?”

“Are you actually _paying attention_?” The Master raised an eyebrow at him surprise. “Usually you’d be snoring at the back of the classroom this far into history.”

“Yeah, well, you have a sexier voice than Borusa.”

The Master paused, and his hormones took the opportunity to derail his brain for a minute, before he shook his head and got himself back under control. This was important; he needed to focus. Once this was all done, _then_ he could take the time to properly explore just how sexy the Doctor found his voice. “One touch from the Glove of Rassilon was all it would take to erase a Time Lord from the Matrix permanently. No afterlife, nothing: just gone, burned to ash. No hope of data recovery.”

The Doctor shivered just thinking about that for too long. “Knock it off,” he complained.

The Master turned to look at him with narrowed eyes, sensing blood in the water. “But that’s not all.” He paused dramatically. “For the Glove of Rassilon to destroy you, he’d have to hunt you down, catch you. It would be possible to run from that. However, in times of great emergency, there was another way. Used only against those who displeased Rassilon the most. Criminals so great that simple death wasn’t enough.”

The Doctor had heard enough Time-Tot horror stories that he knew where this was headed next. “Yeah?” he said, feigning a brave, indifferent tone.

“Yup,” the Master agreed. “If Rassilon were ever really _driven_ to it, he could – at great personal cost – purge an entire Time Lord from existence. Order the entire drive that stored your biodata ejected from the Matrix and _crushed_. All your past, present, and future just _gone_ , every last regeneration eliminated in a mere second. None of you would never have existed, nothing you experienced would ever have happened, just _nothing_. And it wouldn’t matter how fast you could run or how clever you were: all Rassilon needs to purge _anyone_ is their name.” He leaned in close so that he could whisper the last bit right in the Doctor’s ear: “And he knows your name _already_!”

The Doctor jerked away and smacked him, so the Master tackled him, and they wrestled a bit, before they finally came to rest side by side on the TARDIS floor once more.

“You’re such an idiot,” the Doctor muttered. “Rassilon’s not going to purge us. He barely even knows we exist.”

“Oh no?” the adolescent Master cocked an eyebrow, and peered back over the edge of the TARDIS to their mindscapes below. “Check it out,” he insisted, “things are just getting interesting.”

“‘Interesting’?” the adolescent Doctor repeated warily. “‘Interesting’ how? With you, ‘interesting’ usually means we’re stuck etching the Laws of Time onto the Cloister boards a hundred times and missing supper.”

“That was your doing,” the Master insisted.

“Only the first, third, fourth, sixth, and eighth times!” the Doctor retorted.

“That’s still more than half,” the Master said. His eyes narrowed with interest when, just then, the Outer Matrix below lit up with dozens and then hundreds of gold sparks of light, all closing in on their deceptively innocent-looking mindscapes below. “Shh!” he cut off the Doctor’s next words. “Here he comes! It’s starting!”

“What,” the Doctor demanded, creeping up next to the Master to take a look, against his better judgment, “now?”

***

The Doctor’s mindscape trembled.

The Thirteenth Doctor looked up in startled surprise when the lights in the atrium flickered on and off, like some sort of power cut. Across the gravimetric engine from her, the Eleventh Doctor’s head suddenly popped out from the machinery, looking equally bewildered by this turn of events.

“What was that?” he asked.

The Thirteenth Doctor held up a hand to silence him. She could feel a presence now, deep in her bones, that she hadn’t felt for eons – and yet had somehow felt a million times since then, as well.

“Did anyone else just see—?” the Seventh Doctor burst out of his room, a furrow between his brows, and the lights flickered again.

The Thirteenth Doctor felt the next tremor as an ache in the very core of her marrow. This time, the quake was enough to send the Seventh Doctor staggering into the doorframe, and the Eleventh clutched at the engine to keep from falling over. Not the Thirteenth, though. Although the world of their mind swayed and shuddered, she remained utterly stable at the centre, the still point.

“What’s going on?” Several more Doctors’ doors burst open, as they all gathered at the epicentre. Driven like moths to danger, they always had been. Her Second and Fourth and Sixth and Eighth and Ninth – an impressive contingent in almost any disaster. She hoped it would be enough for this one.

“Rassilon,” she said slowly, stepping forward with an almost eerie foreknowledge, “is coming.”

“Rassilon?” the Second Doctor said. “What in Gallifrey’s good name would he want with our mind?”

The Thirteenth Doctor ignored him and stared ahead at the empty space before her at the exact centre of her mindscape. A hand waved in front of her face, as if trying to pull her out of her trance, and she looked up to see that the Eleventh Doctor was now beside her, looking actively worried.

She should probably reassure him. Maybe. Possibly. But more important was…

She glanced around their atrium and frowned once she’d done a quick survey. “Where are the Masters?” she demanded.

But, before any of her could answer, the empty spot in front of her began to slowly distort. She turned back to it sharply, and felt the Eleventh Doctor beside her take one step away, circling it, flanking it with her.

As space and time and reality warped, she felt the other Doctors approach, circling the phenomenon, forming a protective ring around it with their minds. They’d always been shite at telepathy, she reflected with a wince. This was going to _hurt_.

The apparition began to glow as a hot, blinding fissure opened in the Matrix substructure. It was a pinprick at first, but then the gap expanded outwards. Several of herselves gasped and stepped back where they’d circled in too close and got singed. The Thirteenth Doctor, however, had positioned herself perfectly outside the range of the scalding psychic waves.

The fissure pulsed intensely, just as the overhead lights went out again, and this time the fissure was so bright that even she had to blink and look away, although she’d somehow known the flare was coming.

When the flash dulled, her mindscape lights came back, but only as a fraction of what they’d been before. Suddenly, her mindscape didn’t look so much like an opulent hotel lobby as a dingy prison cell. It was an effect she’d witnessed only recently, so it didn’t surprise her, but across the circle from her, she saw the Sixth and the Ninth Doctors frowning and looking mildly alarmed at the change.

Her focus, however, remained on the fissure. The light from within it was dimming now, fading from the pain of a star’s living core to a deceptively angelic-looking halo. The fissure’s shape was now distinctive and clearly humanoid. It was a gaudy effect, over-dramatic and pretentiously godlike.

Fitting enough then that Rassilon stepped out from the fissure. Honestly, TARDIS travel was _such_ a more civilised way to crash others’ minds in the Matrix.

A hush, and then whispered queries, echoed around from the other Doctors.

This wasn’t a Rassilon any of the others had ever seen before, but the Thirteenth Doctor knew him. This was the Rassilon from all her forgotten, stolen memories. The Rassilon who’d forged the Time Lords into masters of the universe and crafted the Matrix as the omniscience from which they would steer its evolution. The Rassilon who’d culled her immortality into his own vision of supremacy. The first Rassilon, the original.

As Rassilon took form, the heat and light around him faded away, until he appeared to be just another Time Lord standing there before her. Even so, the Thirteenth Doctor could still feel the quantum flux rumbling all about him, the very data of the Matrix obeying his every thought, his to create or destroy at will. A giant gaudy glove on one hand brushed against his Prydonian robes, and she had to fight the instinct to flinch away from the Matrix-warping power within it. This, then, was a true Matrix Lord.

The Thirteenth Doctor stepped forward, even though she could feel the Matrix anomaly around him abrade her skin like sandpaper: not scratching her yet but just rough enough to let her know that he could make her bleed, for real. He always had been a thug behind his falsely cultured façade.

He looked her in the eyes, disdainfully, like she was a particularly ugly scratch that some Time Tot had just etched into the hull of his brand-new TARDIS.

And then slowly, he acknowledged, “Doctor.” He said the word in a normal, everyday tone, but he sent a telepathic echo along with it, powerful enough to rattle her younger selves. “Doctor ** _s_**.”

She saw her Second clutch at his head, and her Fourth and Sixth both winced. Her Eighth didn’t react, but he had his Stoic Face on, and it was always hard to tell whether he was hurting when he did that. Still, that gave her some rough parameters on where in her timeline herselves would start being able to stand up to Rassilon’s telepathic attacks. Always good to have information like that.

Rassilon smiled almost beatifically in response to their suffering. “Children of Time. You are, of course, welcome in my Matrix.”

The Thirteenth Doctor heard the Ninth muttering off to one side; it sounded like he was mock-repeating Rassilon’s words.

“However,” Rassilon stepped forwards, “there are certain matters that I would like to make clear.” He sneered down over them all. “I have graciously allowed all Gallifrey’s children to share in my eternity.”

“Out of the generosity of your hearts, I’m sure,” the Sixth Doctor scoffed to the Eighth, who snorted inelegantly in response.

“But there are rules,” Rassilon continued.

“Oh, I am absolutely shocked!” the Fourth Doctor said in a stage-whisper. “Gallifrey with _rules_?!”

“First and foremost,” Rassilon pontificated, “is that the purpose – all of our purpose – in the Matrix is to serve Gallifrey.” He bowed his head humbly in a gesture that didn't fool any of the Doctors in the slightest.

“Never had a humble day in his life,” the Second Doctor groused under his breath.

“To facilitate this greater purpose – of us all – you will henceforth bend your will to the greater good. The Matrix is sacrosanct, and the afterlives you have been given are not intended for you to play with at your leisure. Instead, you shall use the Matrix as intended: remain within your mind, within your designated cells, and meditate upon your life experiences and memories, such that you are constantly ready upon a moment’s notice to devote all of yourself to Gallifrey’s needs.”

The Seventh Doctor, in the background, made some gagging noises.

“Yes, I see,” the Eleventh Doctor said, clasping his hands together in front of himself – seemingly in mockery of Rassilon’s pretend piousness – and then flapped them immediately apart again. “Just to clarify: by ‘Gallifrey’s needs’, you do in fact mean whatever _you_ want, correct?”

“My Child,” Rassilon smiled down on him condescendingly, “my wants _are_ Gallifrey’s needs.”

The Seventh Doctor gagged some more, quite loudly.

Rassilon’s beatific countenance flickered into a frown of annoyance.

The Thirteenth Doctor decided then that that was enough of that. She took a step towards Rassilon, in deliberate parody of his own overbearing greeting: “Rassilon,” she said getting right up in his face so that they were eye to eye, challenging him just as much as he’d challenged her, “founder of Gallifrey. We lowly Doctors have heard and understand your edicts. And I think I speak for all of us when I say, with both my hearts…” She paused dramatically. “Piss off.”

And then she gathered every last fibre of psychic energy in her mind and shoved it with all force she could muster straight through the twin centres of his hearts.

***

“What is happening?” the Tenth Doctor collided with one of the columns and clung onto it for dear afterlife as the Master’s mindscape shook around him so hard that the walls cracked. A shower of plaster fell down from the arches overhead, and he coughed and ran a hand through his hair to shake out the white powder, with middling success.

“Uh-oh!” Missy said, in mock wide-eyed fear. “Daddy’s _angry_ this time! Do you think he’ll give us a spanking?”

The Eighteenth Master snorted, and his eyes narrowed on a spot just behind the Tenth Doctor. “Let him try,” he said gleefully, and then snatched the Tenth Doctor’s wrist and yanked him back away from…

Well, the Tenth Doctor wasn’t entirely sure what. There didn’t seem to be anything where he’d just been standing. But, on the other hand, it was hard to object to being manhandled by such a sexy Master, especially when he looked all wild and dangerous and determined like this.

The Eighteenth Master gave him an exasperated look. “Seriously? _Now_?”

The Tenth Doctor shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, sorry,” he agreed. “Probably not an appropriate time, is it?”

The Eighteenth Master scoffed, but there was a hint of fondness at the corner of his lips, like he couldn’t help but be charmed by the Doctor, even now.

Whatever ‘now’ was.

“Keep your focus!” the Thirteenth Master snapped. He had circled around behind the Tenth Doctor and to the left, while Missy had moved right.

The Third Doctor, who – together with the Fifth and the Twelfth – was now within the amorphous circle the three Masters had formed, frowned. “Are you _herding_ us?” he demanded crossly.

“Not now, dear,” the Thirteenth Master brushed him off, uncharacteristically not even sparing a glance the Third Doctor’s way. Instead, the Thirteenth Master was honing intently upon a blank spot in space, the same way the Eighteenth Master was on the spot he’d pulled the Tenth Doctor from earlier.

The Third Doctor’s eyes widened. “I say,” he said nervously, “is everything quite all right?”

Missy let out a brittle laugh. She, too, was now coiled as if ready to pounce at any second, seemingly at nothing. “Just leave it to us,” she insisted, “and don’t worry your pretty little heads over it.”

“Oh, well,” the Twelfth Doctor snorted derisively, “ _now_ I’m reassured! What mess have you got yourself mixed up in _this_ time?” He stalked over to her.

Missy turned sharply at his approach and threw up one hand, catching him in the middle of the chest and pushing him back. The Twelfth Doctor was about to rail at her further, but then he saw the frightened look in her eyes and froze, mouth half open.

“Missy?” he finally asked softly. “What _is_ going on?”

Missy gulped and turned back away from him to face the invisible threat once more. “Stay out of this, my love,” she said, trying to sound confident and in control, but her voice shook at the edges and then broke on the: “ _please_.”

The Twelfth Doctor gulped and took a step back so that he was corralled with the other Doctors. Missy’s shoulders relaxed marginally with relief as he did so, although she still remained focused on her baffling foe.

“Rassilon, hmm?” The Fifth Doctor had been quiet up until this point, observing everything from under the brim of his hat, with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, but now he tilted his chin up to address them all. He was easy to forget, the Fifth, until he made a sharp turn towards commanding. “For some mad reason, you’ve deliberately antagonised the top Matrix Lord of them all, and now…”

“You’re going to fight him?” the Tenth Doctor blurted out. “ _Here_?! No, no, no! Remember how badly that turned out the last time?”

“We got through it,” the Eighteenth Master said with a seemingly unconcerned shrug.

“What?! No, we didn’t! Well, yes, we did. Well, technically, kinda-sorta… Actually, you know what? I was right the first time: No. No, we absolutely did not.”

“We’re not going it alone this time, though, aren’t we?” Missy cut off the Tenth Doctor’s stream of consciousness. “And this time we’ve come prepared. I think we can all agree that we Masters have much greater success when we’re able to prepare our schemes in advance?”

“Well,” the Third Doctor scratched the back of his neck, “I wouldn’t exactly say _that_.”

“Oh, hush,” the Thirteenth Master cut in, annoyed. “In any case, the question is academic. We have incoming.”

“Two incoming,” the Eighteenth Master said, and tensed.

“Three,” Missy added, and then tilted her head to one side. “And, oh dear: more.”

“More?” the Fifth Doctor said, alarmed, and looked in the direction that she’d eyed. It seemed to him that some sort of ripple had been visible there, for only a moment. “Say,” he said with a nervous laugh when he spotted a fifth flicker and then a sixth out of the corner of his eye, “I don’t mean to be a distraction or anything but: I don’t suppose there are any other yous about? Seems like you could use two or three…or six.”

“That part about not being a distraction?” the Thirteenth Master said tersely when the air in front of him abruptly split in a blinding white light. “Do try to work on that, to the best of your admittedly limited ability.”

“Oh, bur-r-r-r-rn,” the Twelfth Doctor said, and offered the Fifth an unapologetic shrug.

The other three Doctors all opened their mouths at the exact same moment – as if to demonstrate their complete inability _not_ to cause distractions after having spent their entire lives doing exactly that – when the fabric of the Matrix buckled right in front of the Eighteenth Master.

The second the fissure was opened, the Eighteenth Master squeezed his eyes shut tight and then _screamed_ a psychic wave of energy back through the fissure. Reality warped and twisted before him, as if something were trying to come through, before it was blown straight back out of their reality. The Eighteenth Master cracked his neck and immediately ran over to the next nearest fissure that was about to rupture.

Across their little circle, Missy rolled her eyes, winked at the Twelfth Doctor who was still looking alarmed at the whole incursion, and said, “I was _such_ a diva back when I was him.” She turned back to the fissure in front of her just as it opened and tapped it once, calmly, with the tip of her umbrella. “ _No_ ,” she informed it sternly, as one might to a disobedient dog. A telepathic pulse flowed back along her umbrella to the fissure and sealed it neatly. “We _are_ having fun, aren’t we?” she said, and half-skipped over to the next fissure.

“Forget the Doctors: would _you two_ stop distracting me?” The Thirteenth Master’s brow was furrowed, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He was already closing his third fissure. His means of doing so seemed to be just to stare at the opening so intently that it wilted from existence in disgrace. However, it was clearly taking a lot out of him to do so.

The Eighteenth Master, completely ignoring his request, rage-screamed his fourth fissure into non-existence. His face had gone a bit red – “Probably from all the rage-screaming,” the Tenth Doctor mumbled under his breath, and the other Doctors couldn’t help but nod in agreement – but he didn’t seem fatigued yet.

“It makes sense, of course, that the longer each Master has lived, the stronger their mind becomes,” the Third Doctor posited.

As if to prove his point, Missy continued to skip her way around the circle, seemingly closing fissures without a care in the world.

“I say, old chap!” the Third Doctor called out to the Thirteenth Master. “Would you like some assistance?”

“I’m perfectly capable of handling this on my own!” the Thirteenth Master said viciously, and willed away his sixth fissure. He staggered slightly afterward, however; clearly he was nearing his limit.

“I believe that was a resounding ‘no’,” the Fifth Doctor said wearily.

The Third Doctor pursed his lips and did what he did best: theorised about things he knew absolutely nothing about. “We could try to take one of the fissures out ourselves, perhaps, if all of us worked together. We’d be stronger within a telepathic network, of course. Although that sort of thing never has been my strong suit… Do we get any better at that?”

The Fifth Doctor made a face.

The Tenth Doctor held up one hand and waffled it back and for to indicate ‘maybe, a little’, and then said, “Yeah…no, not really.”

The Twelfth Doctor glared at him. “You mean: not at all.”

“Right, what I said.”

Across the circle, the Eighteenth Master faltered for the first time. His yell cracked off at the end, and he finished closing the nearest fissure with his mind alone, as if saving his energy now.

Missy, too, was tiring, if the fact that she was no longer making snide remarks was any indication (which, for her, it most certainly was).

“When is our back-up going to get here?” the Thirteenth Master demanded. “I can’t hold out like this forever.”

Missy’s eyes went distant for a moment, as if she were listening to something very far away. “Still on the other front,” she said simply, no bite to her words, and returned to closing the nearest fissure.

The fissures were opening now at a seemingly exponential rate, as if they’d decided that a bombardment siege was the only option. Dozens flared to existence before Missy, and she hissed and pushed back against them all.

“Hold on!”

***

The Thirteenth Doctor, although certainly the oldest and strongest Doctor present, was what could charitably be called a telepathic feather-weight. Always had been, and both she and Rassilon knew it.

As a result, she was absolutely flabbergasted when the blast from her psychic energy sent the First Rassilon clear across the atrium and straight through one of the pillars.

“How did you _do_ that?” the Eleventh Doctor asked, watching her with awe.

The Thirteenth Doctor looked down at her hands in disbelief and let out a confused laugh. “No idea.” She wriggled her fingers. “It was kinda fun, though.”

From the rubble of the pillar, Rassilon coughed and rose shakily to his feet.

“Get back!” the Thirteenth Doctor called out to her selves nearest him. “Don’t let him touch you, not even for one moment!”

Rassilon clenched his fist, and the glove upon it pulsed once with a lightning crackle, while all the Doctors scattered and hid behind pillars.

“Do it again!” the Eleventh Doctor said anxiously. “Do it again!”

The Thirteenth Doctor did, and this time wasn’t caught by surprise, so that she was able to see what actually happened. “Oh, you clever devil…” she said grudgingly, keeping a secretive smile to herself.

Rassilon had been thrown back so hard this time that the walls of her Matrix enclosure shook. He rose again more slowly and began to circle her cautiously.

“Go on, then.” She smirked at him. “Do your worst. I’m ready.”

“This,” the First Rassilon said suspiciously, “should not be possible.”

“Oh? Why not? You: an early Rassilon. Me: a late Doctor. I’ve just got time and experience on my side, or what not. Tell you what,” she taunted him, “send one of the bigger Billy Goats Gruff in, and make it a fair fight.”

He turned his head sharply to one side, listening.

 _To his other incarnations_ , a little voice whispered in the Doctor’s ear.

“I do not need the others to deal with you,” Rassilon retorted.

 _His other incarnations are too busy, ha!_ The little voice informed her.

“I have been merciful to you up until now, Child of Time, but no more.” Rassilon held up his ungloved hand and thrust a telepathic shockwave in her direction so powerful that she couldn’t even fully perceive the scope of it.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve always hated when you call me that.”

Her own hand flew up in response, and a shield formed at her fingertips. An explosive sound echoed through her mindscape as the two telepathic energies clashed. The after-ripples alone sent every other Doctor present to their knees, but the Thirteenth Doctor held.

She yawned once deliberately, for Rassilon’s benefit. “That all you got? Because I’ve got places to go, people to see…”

Rassilon, for the first time since she’d known him, looked uncertain. “You can’t have grown this powerful this quickly,” he insisted. “Your Twelfth was a pest, but…” He eyed her suspiciously.

“Yeah, but he was just an incremental update; I’m a whole new version release. Now!” The Thirteenth Doctor clapped her hands once, and even the psychic sparks from that were blinding. “Are we gonna have a showdown, or were you retreating?”

Rassilon sputtered at the very thought of retreating – “This is not over, Doctor!” he shouted out – and then he did so, vanishing from her mindscape with another quick, flickering fissure.

The Thirteenth Doctor stood there, taking a few deep, calming breaths, and waited just to make sure none of him were coming back so soon. No more fissures threatened them, however.

 _Regrouping, regrouping, as if it will help an idiot like that!_ The voice in her head chanted.

“That was _incredible_!” The Eleventh Doctor, as the next oldest Doctor present, was the first back up to his feet. “Is it something to do with the extended regeneration cycle? Or those ‘billions of years’ our Twelfth is always grousing about?” He leaned in close and squinted at her forehead from mere inches away, as if there was some kind of scientific measurement he could determine by doing so.

The Thirteenth Doctor giggled once, giddily. “No, nothing like that.”

And then she staggered abruptly, so that the Eleventh had to catch her. The Ninth Doctor was on his feet now, too, and the two of them propped her up between them and guided her over to the nearest sofa. She slumped back onto it gratefully and felt a frisson of dissociation run through her body.

“Oh,” she said with some distaste, “that is _so_ weird.”

“Aha!” The Eighth Doctor, who’d now joined the circle of Doctors around her, widened his eyes in sudden realisation. “I get it!”

“Get it?” the Second Doctor grumbled and checked her pulses. “Get what?”

“Ah…” the Fourth Doctor said. “Of course. Brilliant! It was all a bluff.”

“A _bluff_?” The Sixth Doctor was now shoving at the Second Doctor and getting thoroughly in his way, as if either of them had any medical sense anyway. “She threw him clear across the room.”

The Eighth Doctor raised an eyebrow at the Fourth. “You too?” he asked, sounding mildly impressed.

“Well…” the Fourth Doctor said with a modest shrug of his shoulders, “I do like to try new things…”

“New things?” the Seventh Doctor asked with growing suspicion. “What the blazes are the two of you on about?”

The Thirteenth Doctor’s insides seized up then, and she felt her throat close. She struggled for breath for once moment, and then coughed violently.

Several Doctors moved in to her assistance, but the Fourth and Eighth Doctors pushed them all back to give her room as a coughing seizure took hold of her.

“What are you doing, man?” the Second Doctor demanded. “Let us help her!”

“You can all help her by keeping out of the way,” the Fourth Doctor said, with absolutely zero explanation, per usual.

“Will some sensible Doctor please explain what’s going on?” the Seventh snapped, eyeing both the Fourth and the Eighth as if they were the most insensible Doctors he could think of.

The Eighth Doctor eyed him coldly. “Don’t tell me that, with your superior intellect, you haven’t worked out the entire scheme yet?”

The Ninth Doctor stepped abruptly between his now-furious Seventh and the Eighth. “Didn’t the two of you fight enough while you were alive?” he complained.

The Thirteenth Doctor, meanwhile, felt her stomach began to heave with the coughing. She reached out with one hand to clutch at the sofa arm, and the other was supposed to catch the other sofa arm, except the Sixth Doctor was sitting there so she latched onto him instead.

“What _is_ happening to her?” he asked, alarmed.

“Don’t you see?” the Fourth Doctor began gleefully. “We don’t suddenly become massively telepathically endowed in the future. I doubt anyone could, that much. So, to scare Rassilon off our scent, she faked it.”

“Faked it?” the Eleventh Doctor frowned. “How do you fake telepathy? Unless…”

“In a condition that should now be quite familiar to you all,” the Eighth Doctor explained, as growing realisation settled over all of them, “she has the Master inside of her.”

The Thirteenth Doctor coughed one last time, and she felt a second skin of Matrix data layered just beneath her own biodata peel free. _Try not to miss me when I’m gone!_ The voice in the back of her head said jauntily, and then the extra biodata streamed out of her into a pool on the floor, coalescing into the Twentieth Master’s obnoxious, smirking face.

The Thirteenth Doctor glared at him. “I’d wondered where you’d vanished off to this morning,” she said dryly.

He just grinned and giggled – Ha! _That_ was where all those manic giggles inside her had been coming from! – and beamed up at her, now fully back in his rightful body on his knees in front of her. “Anytime, Doctor.” He winked.

“It’s much less uncomfortable,” the Eighth Doctor advised, “if you get him to do it in goo-snake form.”

The rest of the Doctors and the Twentieth Master all groaned. No one, alas, wanted to hear anything more about goo-snakes.

“Now Doctors,” the Twentieth Master said, clapping once as he rose abruptly to his feet, “I am needed urgently elsewhere. However, I have, in the meantime, bought you something precious: time. Rassilon has come for us at long last, as I’m sure you all observed. This was all planned—”

“Oh no,” the Second Doctor said.

“Here we go!” sighed the Fourth.

“We’re in for it now!” agreed the Seventh.

The Twentieth Master glared at them all. “—well in advance,” he soldiered on. “Rassilon has foolishly put all his eggs in one basket, as it were. He was banking on his one youngest, weakest incarnation being able to defeat all your incarnations at once. However, you have just put up a fight so spectacular that he now believes he cannot battle on both fronts at the same time.”

The Seventh Doctor, whose mind was the most connivingly twisted of the Doctors present, figured out the plan at that moment. “And so he’ll marshal his forces around the most convenient target first. Which, I can only suppose, is where the rest of the Rassilons are: your mind?”

“A kewpie doll for the Doctor with the sexy eyebrows in the back!” the Master agreed. “Now, if you’ll excuse, I have a battle to join.” He strode free of the circle of Doctors and headed straight for the far Matrix wall.

“Wait!” the Thirteenth Doctor said, scrambling up after him. “You’re using your own mind as bait?”

He smiled at her, possibly affectionately, possibly maniacally. “You can thank me afterwards with stupid amounts of sex.”

She snorted. “And you’re expecting us to…what? Sit here, twiddling our thumbs?”

“Doctor, Doctor, Doctor…” The Master shook his head in disbelief. “A telepathic war is no place for you.”

She scowled at him and threw a bit of telepathic irritation at him, just enough so that it was the psychic equivalent of flicking her pinkie nail at his forehead. She wasn’t _that_ weak, of course, but in a battle between the Master and Rassilon, it was a concession that brute force was not going to be her strong suit.

He smiled in response. “No,” he said, “you’re not a fighter. You’re a bloody unpredictable _menace_. And that’s what I’m expecting you to do: create complete, unvarnished havoc the way you always do. I mean… Do you honestly believe I can defeat _Rassilon_ , all on my own?”

“What? I’m just supposed to pull some sort of miracle out of thin air?” she demanded.

“Yes, please,” he agreed, seemingly seriously, “if you’d be ever so kind.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, all right. I’ll see what I can do.” She leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Try not to get yourself killed in the meantime.”

He beamed at her. “Doctor, don’t you know by now? I never die!” And, with that, he disintegrated into his Matrix data-stream and dove straight out through the wall.

The Thirteenth Doctor turned back to her assembled selves. “Right, then,” she said. “Who else feels like a ‘bloody unpredictable menace’ this morning?”

***

The Eighteenth Master fell to his knees. Regardless of the danger, the Tenth Doctor ran over to him and caught him as he fell.

The Third and the Fifth Doctors had long since pulled the Thirteenth Master into the centre of the circle for safety. However, with Missy now the only Master still standing, their ‘circle’ had essentially collapsed into more of a ‘point’. And that point was in danger of soon collapsing as well.

“Idiot,” the Eighteenth Master scoffed at the Tenth Doctor, even while cradled in his arms, and then opened his eyes just enough to close the fissure that was right about to open on top of them.

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way,” the Tenth Doctor beamed. He threw one of the Master’s arms around his shoulders, wrapped his arm around the Master’s waist, and staggered/dragged him back to where the rest of the Doctors and the collapsed Thirteenth Master were. Not that there weren’t fissures opening there, as well. But safety in numbers? Only requiring Missy to defend one target? The Tenth Doctor was sure he could come up with some bullshit explanation that sounded sensible, if pressed.

“Well then,” the Third Doctor said tersely, “I suppose it’s up to me to ask: Do we have any sort of plan for when those fissures successfully open and Rassilon gets in? Because no offense, my dear,” he said to Missy who’d now backed up into their little group, still closing the fissures as quickly as she could, “but even you can’t be everywhere at once.”

Missy snorted, squeezed her eyes shut tight, and suddenly every single fissure currently visible – and there must’ve been at least fifty of them – vanished. The effort clearly cost her, though, and she dropped to one knee. Only by propping herself up with her umbrella did she keep from collapsing entirely.

“I believe that was meant to be a snide comment on how foolishly we consistently underestimate the Master’s sheer intractable stubbornness,” the Twelfth Doctor translated.

Missy shot him a grateful look.

Missy’s gambit had bought them a minute or two. There was a short gap before a series of new fissures started to form.

“I hate to be a hopeless optimist…” the Tenth Doctor began.

“Oh, we _all_ do,” the Third said sarcastically.

“…But, is it just me, or are the fissures getting slower and weaker, as well?”

“I suppose that makes sense,” the Fifth Doctor said. “The entire Matrix substructure is designed to keep each Time Lord within their own mind. Trying to break in to another’s mindscape must be an exhausting process. Maintaining the natural order of things – keeping a foreign mind out – is comparatively much less energy intensive.” Missy found the remaining energy to give him a death-glare at that. “What I mean to say is,” he amended hastily, “if the Masters are this exhausted, the Rassilons must be tenfold so, Matrix Lord or no.”

The Twelfth Doctor groaned and helped Missy into a sitting position on the floor. She slumped against his shoulder and let her eyes fall closed, marshalling her energy before the next attack. “Tell me that isn’t the plan,” he demanded. “Tell me this isn’t just a war of attrition.”

Missy mumbled half-heartedly against the curve of his throat, but didn’t answer. The Twelfth Doctor’s expression softened, and he pressed a quick peck to her forehead, earning himself a smile and a contented hum. “Right, right, sorry about that, ‘m awake,” she muttered and blinked open her eyes but didn’t look particularly so otherwise.

Before them, one of the fissures was solidifying.

“I think you’d better sit this one out,” the Twelfth Doctor advised. “Contact?” he suggested.

“Contact!” the other Doctors all agreed in unison.

Now, to be clear, the Doctors might have failed Basic Telepathy three separate times at the Academy, but it _was_ still a required course. They might not have been naturally talented in the subject, and they might not have been particularly interested in it, but they were full Time Lords and, as such, had been dubbed by somebody (possibly of dubious judgment) as being at the very least fundamentally competent.

For any socially telepathic species, keeping unwanted visitors out of one’s mind was a skill rather like learning to excuse oneself from a particularly chatty stranger who just would not leave one alone at a social function. The Doctors might not like doing it, and the whole experience might be exasperating, but when push came to shove, they absolutely could do so.

The intruder in this case was Rassilon, of course, and they were technically in the Master’s mind and not their own (although, now that the Doctors thought about it, the pair of them did seem to have moved in together at some point, and how ever had that happened without their noticing?) – all that made their task harder. On the other hand, there were four Doctors linked together. That was more than enough psychic willpower.

The fissure began to open, and together the four Doctors pushed back at it. They shoved the threads of Rassilon's biodata right back out of the Master’s mindscape, and the fissure closed with a little ‘ding’, like an old-fashioned cash-register drawer.

“Oh, good one!” the Tenth Doctor said. “Let me pick the next?”

When the next fissure closed, it made a sound like a balloon popping, then fizzling as it zoomed about the atrium before falling flat.

Against his shoulder, the Eighteenth Master stirred long enough to slur, “Y’r’n idiot…”

“Hello, there!” the Tenth Doctor said brightly, delighted to see him awake.

Despite the increasingly lively eye rolls and snide comments from the Eighteenth Master and Missy who were now groggily reawakening, the Doctors closed fissures with the following sound effects, in turn: a clown-car horn, an elephant trumpeting, the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, the yowling screech of a catfight, and the Sound of Silence (that is, the official national Sound of the planet Silence and not the Simon & Garfunkel tune, nor the sound that the actual Silence made; disambiguation in an infinite universe was a real problem).

At that point, the Doctors realised that they were really starting to feel a bit fatigued.

“If Rassilon’s tiring out,” the Twelfth Doctor said, rubbing at his eyes and trying to stay focused, “he’s not doing it quickly enough.”

“Any other bright ideas?” the Fifth Doctor asked.

And it really was a timely question because, as he spoke, the Doctors succeeded in closing one last portal. But they’d been trying to close three at once, and they’d slipped on the second. With a flare of golden light, Rassilon burst through their defences into the Master’s mind. And that, of course, distracted them entirely, so that they also botched closing the third portal, and another Rassilon materialised through it.

At that point, they'd well and truly lost it, and Rassilons came flooding into the Master's atrium, one after the other, surrounding the party of huddled Doctors and Masters.

“ _Exceptionally_ bright ideas?” the Fifth Doctor amended, voice tight.

Next to him, the Thirteenth Master snorted, still unconscious, as if even in sleep he had strong opinions on the Doctors’ ability to come up with anything of the kind.

“Oh…dear…” the Third Doctor said, demonstrating his finely honed talent for massive understatement.

“Children of Time,” the Rassilons said in unison, each with a different voice, but perfectly in time with each other, so that it sounded like an entire chorus chiding them, circling all around them, echoing, with no escape, “you have displeased us.”

“Ah, see,” the Twelfth Doctor whispered to the Third, “ _he_ has a finely honed talent for massive understatement, as well. Quick, try to use your common interest to reason with him.”

The Third Doctor glared at the obvious sarcasm.

“You have turned our crowning achievement,” Rassilon continued to lecture in thousand-part harmony, “our well of immortality, into a…”

“Amusement park?” the Twelfth Doctor suggested.

“Playground?”

“Funhouse?”

“Ball pit?”

“Ooh, nice one! I love a good ball pit!”

“ _SILENCE_!” Rassilon screamed telepathically so loudly that the Doctors’ minds rattled inside their skulls, which made it impossible for even them to sass back. “You are defeated. You will surrender now and submit to our will, or you will be destroyed. Permanently.”

The Rassilon nearest to the Fifth Doctor raised one gloved finger up beside his cheek in warning. Sizzling hot energy of non-being emanated from his fingertip, singeing a line of charred black along the Fifth Doctor’s cheek. The Fifth Doctor shut his eyes and clenched his jaw against the pain, refusing to scream as the first few bytes of his biodata were deleted from the Matrix data stores.

Rassilon moved his hand down to the Fifth Doctor’s throat in obvious threat before pulling away, having made his point.

The Fifth Doctor gulped and raised tentative fingers to the painful burn on his cheek. “Well,” he said with false-sounding light-heartedness, “at least we know that he’s not bluffing.”

“Not looking good,” the Tenth Doctor said, checking on the Eighteenth Master’s state of consciousness, which was still highly dubious. “You?”

The Third Doctor shook his head. The Thirteenth Master was still out cold.

“One-two, one-two, lemme at ’em!” Missy muttered, sounding a bit drunk, her head flopping lazily against the Twelfth Doctor’s shoulder, and her fists punching the air ineffectively. He shrugged at the other Doctors, in turn.

As one, the four Doctors raised their hands, “We surren—” they all began to lie, even though they had no idea yet how exactly they planned to escape after being captured this time.

And then with a loud “tada!” and a sonic boom, a sudden inrush of biodata flooded into the Masters’ mindscape. The force of the gale floored everyone: Doctors, Masters, and Rassilons alike, although of course the Doctors and Masters were already mostly on the floor anyway, so they didn’t have as far to fall.

The biodata coalesced in front of them in a bright purple flash, and there stood—

“I always try to be _fashionably_ late!” giggled the Twentieth Master.

The terrible pun seemed to be in reference to the fact that, in addition to his usual crimes against purple, he’d somewhere picked up a searing blue-violet opera hat that he doffed for his audience of Rassilons, who were all glaring up at him and scrambling back to their feet.

The Tenth Doctor nudged the Twelfth. "I thought you were supposed to nip their fetish for terrible hats in the bud.”

“I tried!” the Twelfth Doctor whispered back defensively. “What more could I do?”

“Now,” the Twentieth Master said with mad glee, “who wants to play?” He beckoned to the Rassilons with one hand in the universal gesture of ‘bring it’.

An entire line of Rassilons rushed him. He merely continued to grin like an absolute lunatic, completely unconcerned, and then at the last moment threw his opera hat up into the air above him.

The hat exploded in a wave of psychic energy that sent all the Rassilons flying back into the walls of the atrium, in every direction. They all impacted _hard_ , sending cracks through the walls and a couple even shattering columns.

“Wasn’t that fun?” the Twentieth Master said. “A million years’ worth of mental explosives, all saved up into one bomb. Anyone want to guess how many more million years we Masters have been planning this?” He held up his hand, and a second opera hat materialised in it.

The Rassilons hesitated because they weren’t complete idiots. However, they were obsessively fixated on their own supremacy, and they weren’t going to let a complete _nothing_ like the Master intimidate them. So they all rushed him again.

“Your funeral,” the Twentieth Master shrugged, and threw his second hat, causing them all to explode backwards once again. Near the Sixth Master’s door, part of the ceiling caved in.

The Rassilons regrouped.

“Do I have a _third_ bomb?” the Twentieth Master sing-songed. “Do I? Do I? The suspense is killing me!” They rushed in on him. His face fell. “Alas,” he admitted, “I do not. Two million years of meditation was _way_ too long already. So I guess I’ll just have to do… _this_.”

He thrust his palm towards the fastest of the Rassilons, and drove a psychic repulsor through his chest, the same way he had back in the Thirteenth Doctor’s body (good times!). The Rassilon crashed backwards, and the Twentieth Master moved onto the next, and the next.

It turned out that this was quite a bit more tiring when he had to do it against infinity Rassilons, rather than just one. That, and they were firing back, which seemed rather unfair. The Twentieth Master dodged one particularly nasty blast that singed his coattails.

“Watch it!” Missy snapped from behind him.

He glanced back to see that the Twelfth Doctor had got her propped up seated, and she was holding up a psychic shield around the Doctors and other Masters, to prevent them from being hit in the crossfire. “Perfect!” He grinned at her. “Just keep on doing that forever.” He turned back to fighting the Rassilons.

Missy scowled. “Oh, just look at me!” she complained. “I wasn’t that flamboyant during _my_ lifetime, let me tell you!”

“Uhh…” the Twelfth Doctor drawled out, but very wisely did not state his opinions on that subject.

“You,” Missy said sharply, having clearly got her second wind, “help me.” She prodded the Eighteenth Master with the tip of her umbrella, where he was being coddled by the Tenth Doctor.

Indeed, upon being jabbed in a particularly sensitive spot by a sharp steel object, it in fact turned out that the Eighteenth Master had been playing possum, just a _wee_ bit, because it felt so very nice when the Tenth Doctor stroked his hair and doted like that. “Fine, fine,” he grumbled, and added his own layer to the psychic shield.

A blast from one of the Rassilons struck the shield just then, ricocheted off it, and accidentally hit a Rassilon on the far side of them.

“Seriously?” the Twentieth Master taunted them. He had broken out a sweat now, but the Rassilons were visibly weary as well, holding back and saving their energy. “My Nana had better aim. Now that Time Lady knew how to deliver a psychic caning, let me tell you. To think that the great Rassilon is more like a limp cloth, flapping in the wind! Supreme being, indeed!” He scoffed and blasted two more Rassilons at once.

No one was exactly sure what the Twentieth Master thought he’d accomplish, taunting the Rassilons like that, but it sure was fun to watch their faces twist up like prunes and their eyes flash with impotent rage. Everyone braced for the next onslaught.

And then, suddenly, all at once, the remaining Rassilons retreated, blinking out of the Master’s battered mindscape in a flurry of gold flashes of light.

The assembled Doctors and Masters waited for a moment, two. After several minutes, some of them were tempted to marginally relax.

“You don’t think it’s possible that we’ve driven him away, do you?” the Fifth Doctor asked, sounding half hopeful but deeply sceptical.

“Not a chance,” said the Twentieth Master, prowling the atrium of his mindscape like an agitated panther, back and forth. “That was far too easy.”

“The Matrix is Rassilon’s domain.” The Thirteenth Master had stirred in the Third Doctor’s arms, his eyes opening suddenly, and he yawned discreetly behind one hand, as if he’d just taken a lovely, refreshing nap (which, technically, perhaps he had). “An ego of _that_ size would never be willing to surrender it.”

“With us again, old man?” the Twentieth Master said with an expression that was half-sneer, half-smile.

“Yes, I do think I am,” the Thirteenth Master agreed. He rose back to his feet and stretched his arms out wide, cracking his back. “I’m feeling quite energised, thank you.”

“I hate to be a downer,” the Tenth Doctor said, “but if Rassilon hasn’t given up…what _is_ he doing?”

“Oh no,” the Twelfth Doctor glared at him, “you _had_ to ask, didn’t you?”

And, indeed, because the universe always waited for the most ironic moment possible to make these sorts of reveals, just then the Master’s entire mindscape shook with such a force that all the Masters and Doctors fell straight back to the floor.

The Masters all looked up and, with a force of unified will, turned the roof of their mindscape transparent like glass, so that they could all see what Rassilon was doing from without.

Outside, in the swirling data-stream of the Matrix at large, Rassilon was assembling. As in, _literally_. Hundreds of his incarnations – from his original reign on Gallifrey straight through to his resurrection for the Time War and beyond – were swirling together through the Matrix ether, almost like a swarm.

The coalesced tighter and tighter, until the spaces between them seemed to vanish, constructing a massive humanoid (well, technically, Gallifreyanoid) shape. A gestalt of Rassilon formed, magnificent and terrible, glowing with a thousand-million shimmering golden lights, and towering above and around the Master’s mindscape so that the entirety of the Master’s mind fit squarely within one of his palms.

“Oh,” one of the Doctors said, or maybe all of him, “that is _not_ good.”


	2. The Ultimate Foe

“What an amazingly pretentious arse,” the adolescent Master said, entirely unironically. He was still peering out the doors to the Doctor’s TARDIS, where he and the adolescent Doctor were watching the scene of the Doctor’s and Master’s mindscapes from high above. He gazed down at the giant Rassilon that now held their home within his palms. “Oblivious too. He still hasn’t spotted us up here. Although, to be fair, we’re not exactly on the same scale at the moment, are we?”

“How big do you reckon he is, hmm?” the adolescent Doctor wondered, popping up behind the Master’s shoulder and leaning down over his back to get a look at Rassilon himself (and obliviously earning himself a blush in response). “Smaller than a planet, for sure. Smaller than a moon?”

“Probably,” the Master agreed, clearing his throat and trying to sound sophisticated and not like he was thinking about having a good, hard snog against the console instead. “Although it depends on the size of the moon.”

“He sure thinks highly of himself, doesn’t he?”

“Well,” the Master conceded, “he _is_ Rassilon.”

The Doctor snickered.

The Master eyed him askance. “What now?” he dreaded to ask.

“I just had a funny thought…” the Doctor said, eyes bright with mischief.

“You’re going to get me in trouble again, aren’t you?”

The Doctor shrugged and grabbed the Master by the hands, tugging him back to the TARDIS console. “Would I ever?”

“ _For_ ever,” the Master corrected, but let himself be led, as hopelessly enraptured as he always would be by the promise in that smile.

“Tell me,” the Doctor said. “Have you ever heard of psychic helium?”

“No…” the Master said warily. “Do I even want to know?”

The Doctor grinned at him madly, which was a sure sign that the answer was no.

***

“Just great,” the War Doctor grumped, looking up at where the ceiling of his room had turned clear as glass (as, in fact, it had throughout the entire Doctor’s mindscape, his other selves’ minds confirmed). “Now you’ve got Rassilon _really_ peeved.”

He watched with one eyebrow raised, looking suitably unintimidated, as Rassilon’s various incarnations swirled together. The faster they swirled, the more they dissolved into little glowing balls of pure golden light: raw Matrix biodata flashing against the Matrix substructure. The lights merged together, forming nodes and connections, looking not unlike the glittering fairy lights on a Christmas tree, or a city when viewed at night by a passing plane overhead, or perhaps a galaxy of golden stars. The only difference was that this shape had three solid dimensions, so that the lights formed the outline of one giant, pompous Time Lord with delusions of godlike grandeur, complete with silly-looking collar (what Time Lord would be complete without?). At least it was fitting that the Rassilons’ physical form now matched their delusions.

“Well,” the War Master said with something of a modest blush, “we Masters do try. But, in all fairness, when is he ever not peeved?”

The War Doctor snorted. “I hope you’re planning to clean up your own mess this time, instead of tricking me into doing it for you, the way you always do.”

“Moi?” the War Master asked with wide-eyed innocence.

The War Doctor grumbled something under his breath, undoubtedly along the lines that it was lucky the War Master was so pretty, or he wouldn’t be worth keeping around. However, just then, Rassilon reached down with monumental hands. One fist closed around the Master’s mindscape next door. Through the tunnel that joined their minds in the War Doctor’s cupboard, the Doctor could see the crushing force threatening to shake the Master’s mindscape apart.

The War Doctor clutched at the entrance to the corridor between their minds for balance, while the War Master steadied himself against the other jamb of the cupboard door. They exchanged a brief worried look, and then Rassilon’s other hand palmed the _Doctor’s_ mindscape.

The resulting quake sent them both straight to the ground. The room around them shook, and great cracks formed in the walls where the pulses of Rassilon’s biodata caused the Doctor's mind to tremble with each gleam of golden light that flared down Rassilon’s enormous fingers.

“Oh no,” the War Doctor said with a wince when he realised that Rassilon was about to do.

With a deafening crack, Rassilon _tore_. The tenuous tether the Doctor had built between their minds twisted and snapped, flimsy thing that it always had been. The ends of it scattered into the nothing-space of the Outer Matrix, dissolving into swirls of disorganised data, like a rope unravelling and then decaying to dust in a quick time-lapse video.

The War Doctor could feel the raw, uncompromising medium of the Matrix blowing in through the cupboard door that now opened upon nothing. The Outer Matrix felt like the empty vacuum of space or the unstructured ether of non-time within the Vortex. He looked down at his hands and could see his biodata blowing away when it came into contact with the raw Outer Matrix, the upper layer of his fingertips sloughing off into dust and flitting into the void.

“Don’t just stand there gaping like a Vortex-struck schoolboy!” the War Master snapped. “Help me!”

The War Doctor shook off his wonder (because sometimes he forgot what an amazing creation the Matrix really was), along with a little bit of fear he refused to admit to, and grabbed the cupboard door that the War Master was trying to shove closed. The War Master pushed, and War Doctor took the handle from the other side and pulled, and together they fought against the swirling tide of incoming unfathomable Matrix-matter that was trying to flood into the Doctor’s mindscape.

“You know what this reminds me of?” the War Doctor asked with a laugh.

“That time when you wouldn’t shut up, even when our very lives were at stake?” The War Master glared at him.

“Salstris IV,” the War Doctor refused to shut up, even though their very lives were at stake, “when _you_ opened the TARDIS doors even though we were on the ocean bottom—”

“—Only to prove _your_ idiocy at refusing to check the TARDIS sensors after a blind landing!”

“You landed us there on purpose!”

“Well, yes, obviously. How else was I going to prove my point?” the War Master demanded.

The War Doctor huffed. “The TARDIS randomisers would _never_!” he insisted, refusing to take the Master’s point even now.

With a final heave and ho, they forced the cupboard door shut the last final inches, and both immediately pressed their backs up against it, holding it closed.

“I don’t suppose you can reach that welder?” the War Doctor asked, waggling his eyebrows in the direction of the tool in question, while the howling winds of the Outer Matrix battered at the door at their back.

The War Master gave him a scathing look and then slid down the door so that his back was still pressed against it, but he was now seated on the floor. He stretched out with his foot and found that he could, indeed, just reach the welder with his toe. With seemingly painstaking slowness, he nudged it with his shoe, inch by inch, until it was within easy enough reach that he could kick it back over to the Doctor without accidentally knocking it out of range. The entire time the door behind them trembled at the incoming flood that was trying to burst through.

“You hold; I’ll weld,” the War Doctor instructed, and started with the bottom corner.

The War Master scrambled back up to his feet to brace his hands on the door more effectively as he leaned his full weight and mind forwards into it. “See that you do a more thorough job than you did last time,” he complained.

“Always the critic!” the War Doctor sighed, as he worked his way as quickly as he could up the side. Just to make the War Master’s life difficult, he stretched right across the War Master’s back, pressing up into him, as he worked on welding the top of the cupboard door shut. “I do hope,” he whispered into the War Master’s ear in a sultry voice, “that this isn’t overly distracting for you.” He nudged his hips deliberately into the curve of the War Master’s surprisingly receptive behind.

“No, of course not, my dear,” the War Master said with silky menace. “Please continue on just as you are. Your attempts to rattle me aren’t transparent in the slightest.”

The War Doctor laughed and pressed an affectionate, spontaneous kiss to the War Master’s cheek, before he released the War Master’s body. The top of the door now sealed, he welded his way down the other jamb. The seal was beginning to do its job by now, and the War Master didn’t have to push as hard to keep the door closed. He looked down at the War Doctor with a light in his eyes that the Doctor would’ve sworn was something along the lines of ‘smitten and besotted’, had anyone but the War Master been wearing that expression.

The War Doctor turned off the welder and let it drop to the floor, mission accomplished. He gulped and took a step forward, to press the War Master back against the door properly this time. He could feel himself trembling, and not because Rassilon’s giant hands were still separating their minds halfway across the Matrix. The Doctor’s hand came up to curl around the War Master’s throat, in a gesture that could be interpreted as loving or threatening. The War Master’s pupils dilated in response: he’d always enjoyed a bit of both.

Slowly, almost trance-like, the War Doctor leaned in and brushed the softest of kisses across the War Master’s lips.

The War Master’s breath hitched, and his pulses thudded beneath the Doctor’s fingertips, but he continued to stand there, uncharacteristically passively, eyes drifted shut, allowing the Doctor to do whatever he willed.

Unfortunately, whatever the Doctor willed would have to wait. Rassilon set down the Doctor’s mind at that moment, seemingly in a free space within the Matrix: an open hole in the endless regular grid of Time-Lord minds. Possibly, this had been where the Doctor’s mind was originally meant to go. Actually, scratch that: with a control freak like Rassilon, this was absolutely where the Doctor’s mind had originally been slated to go.

“Now,” Rassilon’s mental voice boomed and echoed from all the spaces in the Doctor’s mindscape.

The War Doctor winced at the psychic racket, which was frankly migraine inducing.

“Henceforth, you shall submit to your intended purpose,” Rassilon informed them.

The War Master snorted incredulously at the very idea, and the War Doctor found himself agreeing bothheartedly.

“You shall surrender all your minds and your knowledge in the service of Gallifrey,” Rassilon announced. “You shall,” he ground down on their minds particularly hard as he said it, “serve _me_.”

And then his hand swept back into the Doctor’s mindscape, only this time it went _through_ the walls, a giant telepathic net interlaced between his fingers. The War Doctor didn’t have time to react before it ploughed through him. He felt as it probed his mind: the telepathic web was programmed to catch wicked, murderous minds – in short, any trespassers who were within the Doctor’s mind without Rassilon’s permission. The War Doctor was almost relieved when the telepathic trap passed him by unscathed; the things he had done in the Time War were not enough, it seemed, for his incarnation to be mistaken for the Master.

The relief was short-lived, however, because the War Master most certainly was picked up by Rassilon’s telepathic security sweep. “Doctor!” he called out, as Rassilon ripped him from the Doctor’s mind. “I—!” But his words were lost as Rassilon brushed him out into the Matrix beyond.

“No…” the War Doctor said in barely a whisper, as he stared at the space where the War Master had just been yanked cruelly from him.

“Doctor,” Rassilon’s mind weighed down on him, imposing and onerous, “you, I still have use of. Your secrets have granted my children immortality. Your experiences have granted us near omniscience.” Never a good sign when a megalomaniac switched over to the royal ‘we’… “You will provide for our apotheosis.”

“Lay it on a little thicker, why don’t you?” the War Doctor growled, feeling a growing rage building inside him.

“But your little friend”—Rassilon did something, and the Doctor could feel the Master cry out in pain through what remained of their telepathic connection: genuine, true agony, even though the Matrix was not supposed to allow any such thing—“is insignificant to us. If you want us to spare them…” Rassilon caused the Master to scream out yet again, as if to demonstrate that Rassilon could rewrite the very laws of existence here within the Matrix at a moment’s notice. “You. Will. Obey. Me!”

The War Doctor winced at the sound of the War Master’s screams at the back of his mind, and felt the rage within him hone sharper. He looked up at Rassilon and said defiantly, “That’s not your line.”

***

“Oh no, what’s Rassilon done now?” the Twelfth Doctor complained, back in the crumbling atrium of the Master’s mindscape. “Do you have any idea how long it took us to build that bridge between our minds?” He gesticulated with mild irritation at where the giant, golden, glowing, godlike gestalt of Rassilon was pulling their two mindscapes apart.

“About five minutes?” Missy guessed, shaking her head with distaste as the Doctor’s rickety scaffolding disintegrated nearly instantly once Rassilon’s other hand dragged the Doctor’s mind to Rassilon-only-knew where.

“Possibly even eight!” the Twelfth Doctor insisted.

“Believe me,” Missy said with a roll of her eyes, “it showed.”

“Now…” Rassilon announced in what was probably supposed to be an impressive telepathic boom, the same decree as he’d made over the Doctor’s mindscape, but suddenly his voice dissolved into a high-pitched squeak, as if he’d unfathomably somehow just breathed in helium. “Henceforth, you shall submit to your intended purpose. You shall serve _me_.”

“Ha!” the Third Doctor exclaimed. “Do I detect the whiff of good old psychic helium?”

The Fifth Doctor laughed. “Oh, that does take me back. We haven’t used that stuff in ages!”

“A younger us taking the piss, no doubt,” the Third Doctor agreed.

“Let me guess,” the Thirteenth Master said, rubbing a weary hand over his eyes. “It does exactly what atomic helium does to vocal cords, only to telepathic voices instead?”

“Doctor,” Rassilon continued to squeak cutely, “you, I still have use of. Your secrets have granted my children immortality. Your experiences have granted us near omniscience. You will provide for our apotheosis.”

“Aww!” the Tenth Doctor said. “He sounds absolutely _adorable_ like that, issuing all his ickle ultimatums!” He frowned, then considered. “Or is it ultimata? Do you use the Latin plural for that?”

“Try to focus for two whole seconds straight,” the Eighteenth Master said with an indulgent sigh. “I know it’s difficult.”

“But,” Rassilon was obviously trying to sound menacing now, but instead he peeped like a frustrated little bird, “your little friend is insignificant to us.”

“Tell us something we don't know,” the Thirteenth Master said with a scowl.

The Eighteenth Master bit the inside of his cheek and cracked his neck, as if he wanted to lunge straight out of his own mind and strangle Rassilon with his comparatively tiny hands.

Missy smacked him across the chest with her umbrella to hold him back. “Patience, dear. You’ll get your turn. He’s just trying to wind us up.”

The Eighteenth Master nodded sharply but didn’t look pleased about it.

“Rassilon’s mistake, underestimating _your_ sheer stubbornness,” the Fifth Doctor said lightly, but he was wearing a brittle sort of a smile, like the crinkles around his eyes were actually expressing an entirely different, possibly-lethal-to-Rassilon emotion instead.

“If you want us to spare them…” Rassilon yipped. “You. Will. Obey. Me!”

At that, all three Masters lost their cool simultaneously. Which is to say, of course, that they all burst out laughing.

“Oh,” the Thirteenth Master guffawed, “this was all been worth it just for that!”

“You. Will. Obey. Me!” Missy repeated in an imitation of Rassilon’s squeak.

The Eighteenth Master giggled, wiping at the tears streaming from his eyes. “Even if this kills me, I can die happy having at least heard _that_!”

“Who’s an itty-bitty Rassilon?” Missy cooed.

“So cute!” the Eighteenth Master said in the same saccharine-sweet voice.

“Stop calling me cute!” Rassilon exclaimed, having somehow managed to reverse the helium-filter on his mental commands. “We have had enough!” Rassilon’s voice rumbled low and menacing and imperious now, and the Rassilon-gestalt above them swept its hand through the Master’s mindscape.

The Masters winced in anticipation, but the net filtered right through them. There was a telepathic sensor on the sweep, seeking out minds that didn’t belong. Only this net searched for the opposite of what its partner in Rassilon’s other hand had done; this hand sought out the compassionate, the moral, the insufferably smug. The web hit the Doctors hard, tangling them in its telepathic folds, dragging them scrambling and kicking and screaming out through the far wall and away from the Masters’ startled looks.

The Twelfth Doctor sputtered and called out, “We need to brace ourselves!” as Rassilon’s hand pulled them past the edge of the Master’s mindscape and back into the Matrix at large.

“Contact!” the Third Doctor called out, sounding alarmed under his attempt to focus meditatively. And then the Fifth, Tenth, and Twelfth shouted out the same in almost perfect unison, linking together telepathically to form a protective bubble, as they were swept out into the chaotic forces of the Outer Matrix unprotected.

Rassilon’s swipe had also snagged a fifth Doctor from somewhere, the Twelfth could just make out when he squinted, in a far fold of the net. “Join us!” he shouted over to her as best he could, but she just smiled at him sweetly and shook her head, as if unperturbed. It seemed, whichever Doctor she was – far in the future, no doubt – she had a survival plan of her own. Which, frankly, was more than the Twelfth Doctor had.

The psychic network which the Third, Fifth, Tenth, and Twelfth Doctors had formed was holding, but only barely. Fortunately, Rassilon’s telepathic sweep had been broad in its scope: it had virtue-signalled all the Doctors, culling them from the Masters, but at the same time it had also ensnared all their TARDISes as bycatch.

“Can we make a run for it?” the Third Doctor asked. In front of him, their psychic barrier fizzled and snapped, as the Outer Matrix ate through it like a slowly creeping acid.

“Can we afford _not_ to make a run for it?” the Fifth Doctor retorted.

“I haven’t got to say this in ages,” the Tenth Doctor said, “but: when I say ‘run’, run!”

“ _Run_!” the Twelfth Doctor shouted the moment his Tenth had finished.

Their telepathic shield buckled the instant they moved and broke their connection to each other. Raw Matrix poured past the barrier, as the four of them ran in separate directions, to the four TARDISes that had been scooped up with them. Possibly, it would have made more sense for them all to dive for the Third Doctor’s TARDIS, which happened to be closest. But, well, they weren’t really particularly sensible when it came to their TARDISes. If these were to be their last moments, none of them wanted their own TARDIS to feel like they preferred another Doctor’s TARDIS instead.

Fortunately, being Doctors, they were all very experienced at running away from things against all odds and making it in the nick of time. Although the Tenth Doctor did manage to get his coat caught in his TARDIS door, and when he yanked it free the next second, the part that had been outside had dissolved completely. He looked dejectedly down at his ruined coat, tried to summon it back into a repaired state, and discovered that apparently the Matrix wasn’t fixing things based on their mental commands anymore. It made sense that Rassilon would turn that off, of course, but it was still sobering.

The other three Doctors seemed to agree when the Tenth pulled their TARDISes up on the viewer. Or, at least, his Third acted blasé, his Fifth smiled tightly, and his Twelfth ranted about how it had always been an unpractical coat anyway. So, yes, all three of them were clearly deeply worried as well.

“Should we try to dematerialise?” the Tenth Doctor asked, frowning at the console readings and trying to make any sense of the nonsense data that was apparently generated when his TARDIS was inside the hand of a being that could rewrite the very nature of existence around them.

“My TARDIS seems to believe I _have_ dematerialised,” the Third Doctor said with pursed lips, and tried smacking the sensors with his palm.

“At least that’s somewhat reasonable,” the Fifth Doctor let out a long-suffering sigh. “My TARDIS thinks it’s a whale.”

“Again?” the Twelfth Doctor groaned. “Well, mine is… Oh dear: my TARDIS thinks she's me, and I am my TARDIS, apparently. My TARDIS – I, that is – think that I – the TARDIS – should try turning myself inside out.” He looked down at his shirt. “I don’t think turning myself inside out is a particularly good idea, do you?”

The Tenth Doctor blinked back at him with pale-blue eyes and dark-navy skin. “Don’t try dematerialising,” he suggested. “I did, and now my colour scheme’s all inverted.” He materialised again and returned back to normal. “Ri-i-i-i-ight… So, anybody have any ideas what to try now that no laws of physics exist anymore?”

The Twelfth Doctor turned his monitor to the outside world (or rather, his TARDIS tried to turn his eyes in that direction, until he batted her aside and pointed her correctly instead). The other Doctor was still out there, now leaning her back against her TARDIS, seemingly shielded in the void of the Matrix.

“Who’s that?” the Third Doctor asked, apparently also taking a peek, even though if he truly _were_ dematerialised, there would be nothing to take a peek _at_.

“Another Doctor,” the Twelfth Doctor said. “Although she has unusually sensible shoes for us…”

“Hey! Whose shoes are you calling insensible?” the Tenth Doctor demanded.

“Surely not yours.” The Twelfth Doctor rolled his eyes. “Unless _you_ think your shoes are insensible?”

“Well… No,” the Tenth Doctor conceded, befuddled.

“There! See?” the Twelfth Doctor triumphantly. “Nothing to get offended about.”

The Tenth Doctor eyed him suspiciously, but let it go. “There, now,” he said, as something new approached. “That's Rassilon’s other hand, isn’t it?”

They all watched it sweep past in the other direction. Out in the net, the sensibly-shod Doctor outside waved to the other passing hand.

“It looks as though Rassilon’s sweeping up the stray Masters as well,” the Third Doctor said, focusing mentally very hard until he remembered the future well enough to identify the War Master, who looked quite outraged at being bandied about like this. “And isn’t that…?” He frowned, and the future memory swirled away from him at the other mind trapped in Rassilon’s Master-hand.

“The _Valeyard_?” The Twelfth Doctor’s eyebrows rose in disbelief.

“Is it?!” The Tenth Doctor squinted at the monitor through his glasses. “What’s he doing there? Oh, Rassilon will not be happy when he realises he mis-set the thresholds of his telepathic nets.”

“Well, yes,” the Twelfth Doctor agreed, “but think about it: what mental characteristic _could_ you use to categorise the Valeyard as one of us instead of one of the Masters? Rassilon probably did it by level of glee at his body-count or something else equally basic.”

“Yeah, well,” the Tenth Doctor said, “he doesn’t look happy. Good riddance, though, I suppose.”

“Who the deuce is the Valeyard?” the Third Doctor was still having a remarkably hard time remembering things that hadn’t yet happened to him.

“You don’t want to know,” the Twelfth Doctor groaned.

“Whatever you do,” the Tenth Doctor advised, “don’t ask our Sixth.”

That was generally always good advice, so the Third Doctor let it drop. “We seem to be slowing down now. And, I say… Is that our mind?”

“Oh, that’s obvious! Stupid of me not to figure it out sooner.” The Tenth Doctor smacked his forehead. “Rassilon wasn’t trying to _kill_ us by shoving us into the wilds of the Matrix…” (“Could’ve fooled me!” the Third Doctor huffed on the monitor.) “He’s trying to _separate_ us. Restoring his Matrix to proper order. Filed and collated, like good little Time Lords.”

The Twelfth Doctor groaned. “Oh no. He’s going to enforce his dull, monotonous vision of the afterlife onto us, isn’t he? Pious meditation in the morning; incessant droning until teatime?”

“Yeah,” the Tenth Doctor said, “I’m not having any of that. You?”

“I should say not!” the Third Doctor huffed.

There was a pause, wherein all of them expected to hear their Fifth chime in in agreement, and simultaneously all three of them realised that their Fifth had been surprisingly silent for quite a long time.

“I say,” the Third Doctor finally said, “two-mes-on, are you all right?”

A weary sigh sounded over the communicator. “Look, I’m asking for my TARDIS here, but… I don’t suppose any of you happen to have a spare tonne or two of plankton aboard, do you?” the Fifth Doctor asked, sounding rather harried.

“Yes,” all the other Doctors agreed instantly, as if the answer could ever possibly be anything else, and released their collected plankton into the Outer Matrix.

“Thanks,” the Fifth Doctor said with relief, as his TARDIS merrily gobbled down all the other TARDISes’ plankton, before finally agreeing to settle back into a proper time-ship again. “You’re all lifesavers.”

***

In the atrium of their mindscape, the assembled Doctors scattered as five TARDISes were suddenly shoved inside with a swipe of Rassilon’s massive hand. One of the TARDISes had a Time Lady seated beside it, reading a book unconcerned, and wearing inordinately sensible shoes. Another TARDIS appeared to be retracting a pair of flippers back inside it. Of the two sights, the sensible shoes were definitely odder in the Doctor’s mindscape.

“Hello, me!” The Twelfth Doctor burst out of one of the other TARDISes. “As I’m sure we can all agree that an afterlife without the Master scarcely bears thinking about—”

“Way ahead of you, old man,” the Thirteenth Doctor said with a raised eyebrow, pausing at where she was dragging what seemed to be the Chameleon Arch from the Ninth Doctor’s TARDIS into her own. “You want in on our plan, or what?”

“Fine, then, if you want to be that way, old _er_ woman!” the Twelfth Doctor huffed, and frowned. “We have a plan?” He stepped back out of the way to allow the Fourth Doctor through, who had a giant megaphone on a trolley and was pushing it the other way.

“Well…” the Thirteenth Doctor shrugged, and yanked the Chameleon Arch the rest of the way through her TARDIS doors with a final tug.

“Rassilon’s an arse; make his afterlife miserable; try to distract him away from killing the Master; don’t trip anyone else up,” the Eleventh Doctor elucidated lightning-quick all in one breath. “Any questions?”

“Yes,” the Tenth Doctor said, “can I borrow some baking soda and all your red food dye?”

The Eleventh Doctor beamed at him as if this were the most brilliant suggestion he’d heard all day. “Absolutely!” he agreed.

“Oh no, not you two conspiring again,” the War Doctor groused. He’d stumbled into the atrium ostensibly to tell the other Doctors that Rassilon had kidnapped the Masters, but given the state of absolute pandemonium (more so than usual, that was) of the Doctors loading their TARDISes with all sorts of random nonsense, it seemed everyone already knew. “Right,” he sighed. “I suppose it’s up to me, then, to hold down the fort, while the rest of you run off?” That had, of course, been his lot in life: the one not-Doctor forced to do what needed to be done for the greater good, a sacrifice to the Time War. Not that he’d ever much relished the role.

“Well, if you don’t mind…” a very polite voice cut in, and the War Doctor turned to find the sweet-faced woman who’d just been flushed from the Masters’ mindscape, with the sensible shoes. She was looking up from her book now, although she was still seated against the side of her TARDIS, and smiling up at him with kind eyes. “I’m happy to stay behind in your stead. Really, I’d prefer it.” She pointed to her book. “I need to finish this chapter, you see?”

The War Doctor had no idea whether the Time Lady was his future or past (rather a lot of the latter had cropped into existence, seemingly out of nowhere, of late), but he wasn’t about to look a gift-horse in the mouth. “You’re an angel!” he informed her, gave her shoulder a quick squeeze, and ran off to his TARDIS as well, hefting an oversize spool of wire over his shoulder along the way, and trailing the end along after him. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome!” the Lumiat shouted after him, and flipped to the next page in her book. The TARDISes vanished, one vworp after another, until she and her TARDIS were the only ones who remained in the mindscape into which she’d been misclassified. Or maybe been correctly classified; it didn’t seem to matter quite so much these days. “There,” she said, “that’s much quieter,” and returned to reading.

The title of the book in her lap was ‘The Complete Administrators Guide to the Matrix’.

***

Rassilon deposited the Valeyard, along with the still-trembling War Master, into the Masters’ atrium. The Valeyard caught the War Master’s shoulders, trying to support him, because whatever shocks of pain Rassilon had raked through his body earlier had looked nasty, lighting his biodata on fire from within like a lightning strike. However, the War Master brushed him off with an impatient shove, in order to straighten his waistcoat and slick his hair back into place, acting as if a bout of torture was nothing more than a dishevelling inconvenience.

The Valeyard shrugged off the rejection of his help and looked around disdainfully. The Master’s mind had seen better days. Several columns had fallen, the walls were cracked, and rather a lot of items seemed to be singed. The Valeyard shunned a now-tattered sofa, and instead settled himself into a regal leather armchair, rather like something one might find in one of the finer gentlemen's clubs from Earth’s more corrupt and socially stratified eras.

“I see Rassilon is as short-sighted as predicted.”

The Valeyard turned to face the sudden looming presence over his shoulder. It was the Thirteenth Master, of course. The Thirteenth Master was an expert in looming over people, just so long as they’d been kind enough to seat themselves down first in order to facilitate said looming.

“Quite,” the Valeyard agreed dryly. “My true identity seems to have slipped right out from under his nose.” He willed a newspaper from the Matrix, but one didn’t materialise. He frowned. “How irritating.”

“Quite,” the Thirteenth Master said, most likely in mockery. “I trust you can manage the rest on your own."

“I trust you don’t have some back-handed way of cheating me out of victory – _our_ victory,” he corrected, “once I do.”

The Thirteenth Master chuckled. “Oh, my dear, would I do such a thing?”

“I should hope not,” the Valeyard agreed. “Because a clever man – one with, say, the Doctor’s predisposition for throwing a spanner in the works – would most certainly have come up with a particularly nasty fall-back plan, were his allies ever to betray him.”

The Thirteenth Master’s smile turned brittler. “But of course. And,” he said, “I assume such a clever man would also realise when his allies were of the sort who would not take kindly to threats?”

“Why, this entirely hypothetical clever man would have to watch his back even more closely with such allies!” the Valeyard agreed, and smiled.

The Thirteenth Master smiled back.

They might have killed each other, smiling like that, but then overhead, Rassilon’s gestalt turned back on them. It held the Master’s mindscape between both its palms now, having abandoned the Doctor for the time being, and slowly Rassilon began to twist it apart.

The Valeyard sighed. “Someday, he’ll really have to learn to stop underestimating me.”

“Someday,” the Thirteenth Master agreed. And then added condescendingly: “See that you don’t fail.”

“See that _you_ don’t fail,” the Valeyard called out to his back, more than a little childishly.

The Valeyard watched the Thirteenth Master stride away from him, towards where all the Masters had now assembled. He felt some envy as, one by one, they dissolved into their biodata. The adolescent Master appeared to be absent, suspiciously enough, but the Second Master was there, and even at that young age, she was able to fluidly transform into pure thought. The Valeyard, despite his advanced number of incarnations, still hadn’t mastered the trick to that. Perhaps if all his frivolous selves hadn’t wasted their lives gallivanting about aimlessly, he’d have developed the strict mental discipline needed. Or perhaps it was simply a skill which only someone with the Master’s impressive psychic endowments could ever, well, _master_.

Unlike Rassilon’s golden glow, the Masters appeared to be lit up from within by an ominous purple. The Valeyard watched as they went: after Two, then Three, then Four and Five. Thirteen gave the Valeyard a menacing glare when it was his turn, before he too faded into a ball of swirling purple light. The Fourteenth Master was also missing, but the Valeyard knew what that was about, of course. Next went the Fifteenth and then the War Master and on and on. With each Master, the glow of incandescent biodata was larger and brighter, until by the time the Twentieth Master went, the Valeyard had to look away.

He felt, rather than saw, when the last of them (first of them? Or was it the same?) had finally gone. The sudden rush of all their biodata pouring out through the Master’s mindscape walls felt rather like a sharp pressure change in one's ears upon a rapid ascent. Or, at the very least, like what some human or other had described that feeling as, ages ago, to some other version of himself who had actually cared.

He looked up at the still-transparent ceiling and felt the Master’s mindscape warp and twist in Rassilon’s palms, now with only himself inside it. The Valeyard pursed his lips. He really would be very cross if the Masters betrayed him at this point. He would understand, of course, because he’d gladly have done the same to them himself, but he’d still seek revenge with extreme prejudice.

He watched and waited and refused to admit that he was just slightly nervous that the betrayal would come.

In point of fact, it did not. But the Valeyard considered that a mere technicality and concluded that he owed the Masters absolutely nothing for keeping their word.

Instead, just as promised, the purple glow of the Masters’ biodata began to coalesce around the gold of Rassilon’s. A network of purple veins of light formed and twisted around Rassilon. The Masters connected and joined, each adding their individuality to the greater whole.

A Master gestalt emerged, to match the one Rassilon had created.

Rassilon, no doubt startled by finding himself suddenly facing a foe of his own size, dropped the Master’s mindscape. The Valeyard breathed a sigh of relief, and held his breath as Rassilon and the Master, in their ultimate forms, clashed above him.

***

“Oh my,” the Eighth Doctor said breathlessly, over the communication circuits. “Is that…?”

His TARDIS, along with a fleet of others, had materialised in more or less the right place, in more or less the right time, in the generally vicinity of where the Doctors’ and Master's conjoined mindscapes had once been. None of the Doctors liked to say anything, but quite possibly the only reason the TARDISes had been more or less on point was that this had been their home base for ages upon ages, and it was nearly impossible to get these coordinates wrong. (Although, needless to say, several TARDISes had, indeed, ended up in odd places like data back-up, disk-defrag (which was a separate adventure in and of itself!), or the command prompt (which, alas, was biodata-locked).) However, enough TARDISes had managed to reach their intended destination that they still comprised a fleet.

The Master’s mind alone remained here now, looking unforgivably lonely. Its outer hull was bent and twisted, as if Rassilon had tried to rip it apart with his bare hands.

“Which, knowing Rassilon’s temper tantrums, he absolutely has done…” the Ninth Doctor said over the communication line.

“‘Tantra’?” came the Tenth Doctor’s voice, sounding scratchy and broken, like his connection was weak. His TARDIS had accidentally materialised through a patch of security bots, after all.

“Oh no,” the Twelfth Doctor said, “don’t you start with that nonsense again!”

“Can we focus on the important thing here?” the Eighth Doctor asked, starry-eyed. “Is that, or is that not…?”

Beneath the ring of TARDISes, Rassilon and the Master fought. Only the Masters had all now unified and transformed, like Rassilon, into a giant construct of biodata. Violet and pulsating with ominous light, the Master gestalt had coiled itself around the Rassilon gestalt and was choking the life out of Rassilon and pulling him back and away from where the tattered remains of the Master’s mindscape lay.

The War Doctor groaned.

“Don’t say it!” the Thirteenth Doctor warned.

The Eighth Doctor said it: “GIANT GOO-SNAKE!” And we all know by now _how_ he said it, roughly like this:

## 

*Y*****G  
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**\\\***N  
***))**T  
**//****  
*//****G  
((*****O  
*\\\****O  
**\\\***-  
***))**S  
**//***N  
*//****A  
((*****K  
*\\\****E  
**V****!  


“Well, at least someone’s happy,” the War Doctor sniped with irritation.

“Can we please focus on the task at hand?” the Thirteenth Doctor said.

“Right…” The Eighth Doctor shook off his sudden, inappropriate onset of ecstasy. “We have to help Goo-Snake!”

“Do you _have_ to say it like that, man?” The Third Doctor ran a weary palm over his eyes. “It sounds absolutely ridiculous, when you put it that way!”

“Yes, because you certainly never sounded absolutely ridiculous in your lifetime,” the adolescent version of the First Doctor suddenly popped up on another monitor screen in the array present in each TARDIS.

“And where the devil have you been?” the Third Doctor demanded.

“Here, watching the show right from the start. Didn’t you hear the bit with the psychic helium, hmm?”

“Loved the bit with the psychic helium,” the Tenth Doctor cut in, while the Third Doctor huffed in the background. “How’d you deploy it, by the way? If, say, I had a similar idea, possibly involving…” He muttered something under his breath; on the next monitor over, the Eleventh Doctor hid a snicker behind his hand.

“Back of the left kneecap,” the First Doctor answered, “there’s a gap, more than big enough to fit a TARDIS through. Rassilon won’t even spot you with the ruckus the Masters are causing. He’s not really very observant, for a supposed all-seeing, all-knowing god.”

“Cheers!” the Eleventh Doctor said, and his TARDIS and the Tenth Doctor’s peeled off from the fleet, spinning down towards Rassilon’s knees.

And that, apparently, was the signal for chaos to commence, forthwith.

Rassilon’s hands clasped the Goo-Snake around the throat, so that for a moment they were strangling each other. However, then Rassilon squeezed so hard that cracks formed in the Masters’ bio-network, and it became quite apparent that, while the Master was putting on a good show of it, Rassilon was clearly significantly stronger.

“Makes sense, I suppose,” the Second Doctor commented. “Matrix Lord, and all. It’s hardly even odds.”

However, in order to even those odds, at that moment, the War Doctor’s and the Ninth Doctor’s TARDISes rounded Rassilon’s gestalt, at calf level, unspooling the giant wire between them. The TARDISes warped and spun about Rassilon’s knees, effectively tying them together.

Rassilon stumbled and fell backwards, releasing the Goo-Snake mere moments before its body was about to snap in two. The thud when Rassilon hit the ‘ground’ (whatever ‘ground’ meant metaphorically in this situation – who knew?) shook the Matrix to its very core. Rassilon’s momentary stillness gave the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors’ TARDISes the moment they needed to dive in through the convenient gap at the back of Rassilon’s knee, into the body of the beast.

Rassilon’s grip also conveniently loosened. The Goo-Snake slithered quickly free and coiled up behind the fleet of incoming TARDISes, healing its wounds. “About time you decided to turn up!” An additional monitor popped up on the Doctors’ TARDIS arrays, featuring Goo-Snake, which shouldn’t particularly have been possible, but the Doctors were all so used to the Master breaking into their TARDIS in impossible ways that it didn’t even really register these days.

“Yeah, well, you know me…” the Thirteenth Doctor said. “Never can decide what to wear.”

“You have now worn the same ridiculous outfit, day-in and day-out, for the last infinity years,” the Goo-Snake accused.

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from you, Mr. Purple Socks with Hot Pink Polka Dots!” the Thirteenth Doctor retorted.

The Goo-Snake winced, visibly. “Only one of me does that!” they insisted.

“Yes, and the rest of you are all bastions of high fashion…”

Meanwhile, the Rassilons willed away the cords that had bound their legs, and arose to their feet once more. They snatched straight for the Goo-Snake’s throat, which still hadn’t fully repaired itself. The Goo-Snake dodged left, then right, then split in two right down the middle when Rassilon struck dead and centre so that there was no way one large Goo-Snake could get out of the way quickly enough.

“If you wanted to be annoying,” one half of the Goo-Snake will still talking through the monitors, “would you kindly do it in Rassilon’s direction instead?”

As if planned – although it clearly wasn’t – at that moment, a giant blue whale swam in through the ether of the Matrix. The unusual thing about this (apart from all the _other_ unusual things, that is) was that this particular blue whale seemed to have ‘Police Box’ written in large white letters on one side of its tailfin.

The blue whale ploughed right into Rassilon’s midsection, which – giant or no – sent Rassilon wheeling back. The blue whale bounced back off Rassilon, stunned, then seemed to shake itself off, and swam off into another random direction with a mighty flap of its tail.

Over the monitor, the Fifth Doctor’s voice could heard frantically be heard calling out, “Can anyone lend me some krillllllllllllllllllll?”

And with that, the blue whale swam on out of the scene once again.

Everyone paused for a moment to process this latest occurrence, including Rassilon who looked absolutely befuddled by this turn of events, being unfamiliar with the Fifth Doctor’s TARDIS and its characteristic cetacean confusion.

“Thank you, my dears. That was excellent. I withdraw my previous criticism,” the Master apologised. The two halves of the Goo-Snake had found each other again, and were remerging. “What do you think, Doctor?” a thousand-thousand Master voices echoed infinitely through each TARDIS monitor. “Something a bit more humanoid might better serve our purpose, don’t you think?”

As the Master said it, their gestalt resolidified, indeed in human form. Being comprised of vague, glowy-purple lights, the Master’s ultimate form didn’t have any concrete facial features, per se, such that it was generic enough that the Master gestalt didn’t look like any one particular incarnation. Except, of course…

“I knew it!” the Thirteenth Doctor said. “Of _course_ the platonic ideal of the Master would have to have a beard!”

Every Doctor was forced to acknowledge the fundamental truth in that, even the Doctors whose Masters hadn’t had beards.

The Master's gestalt faced Rassilon, now equal in size. Well, perhaps the Master was still significantly shorter, even in the form of pure, abstract data.

“He’d never admit it, you know,” the Tenth Doctor said, “but he always has had a bit of a fetish about that.”

“A bit of an insecurity, more like,” the Third Doctor countered.

“Well,” the Twelfth Doctor agreed with them both, “if you’re mad enough, a fetish and an insecurity are basically the same thing.”

“Ah,” the Master gestalt said, now one collective voice again. They wriggled their colossal fingers. “That’s better!” After all, while goo-snakes had many and varied uses (most of which the Master only knew about because the Eighth Doctor had suggested them), there were certain advantages to arms, after all.

For example, the Master’s now-Time-Lord gestalt was able to catch Rassilon’s fist in between his palms. He rolled to the side, causing Rassilon’s latest blast of psychic destruction to shoot harmlessly off into the infinite. Rassilon twisted in the Master’s grip, caught hold of his arm in turn, and twisted it sharply behind his back.

At this point, the Third Doctor started shouting out irritating suggestions from the side-lines, all along the lines of “no, no, pivot your weight through the back of your heel!” or “use a reverse leg-lock!” or “the pressure point is right _there_ , man, good god!” to the point where all the other Doctors muted him. There was nothing worse than backseat aikido.

Once he was muted, however, the feeds from the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor’s TARDISes could be heard again.

“Ready?” asked the Eleventh Doctor.

“Ready!” shouted back the Tenth.

“Three, two, one…”

“Now!”

“Run!” the Eleventh Doctor exclaimed, hopefully unnecessarily.

A moment later, their two TARDISes shot back out of Rassilon’s knee, and with perfect timing because in the next second Rassilon burbled.

Rassilon froze in response. From within, his ribcage rumbled. As then slowly, inevitably, an overwhelming flood of red-orange foam oozed out from the gaps in the golden network of lights that made up his gestalt.

“What _is this_?” Rassilon shrieked in outrage.

Over the monitor, the Eleventh Doctor giggled and clapped. “I don’t care how often I’ve seen that, it never gets old!”

“Good old baking soda, vinegar, and red food colouring…” the Tenth Doctor agreed. “What Time-Tot home-volcano kit would be complete without them?”

“Wait, wait,” the Twelfth Doctor said, “you left out the anti-chronon fizz-drops!”

“ _Au contraire_!”

As if to prove the point, at that moment, the anti-chronon pills dissolved in the volcanic foam. The Rassilons suddenly found all their limbs moving backwards, in the exact opposite of the way they intended, as if their own personal time-field was reversed.

The Rassilon gestalt let out an exclamation of fury but then focused for one moment, rewiring the Matrix to vanish the lava-orange baking-soda volcano foam and all the pesky anti-chronons in one instant.

“Aww!” the Eleventh Doctor complained. “Now, that is just not fair!”

“Yes, well,” the Fourth Doctor cut in, “if you can’t beat ‘em, annoy ‘em into submission, I always say. Or maybe I only said it the once. Just now, as a matter of fact.” And then he situated his TARDIS directly before Rassilon’s gargantuan face and flicked on his loudspeakers at full blast.

The blare was deafening, horrifying…and yet surprisingly in key.

“Is that…opera?” the Third Doctor guessed, baffled, as a deep voice belted out some rather bizarre lyrics. They were certainly sung in an operatic style.

“No, no, I know that!” the Ninth Doctor said. “It’s _Cats_ , isn’t it?”

“It’s _Cats_ , being sung as opera,” the Eighth Doctor concluded in stunned awe. “Where on earth did you _find_ this?”

Suddenly, on the view screen, the Sixth Doctor sputtered. “Have you been _recording me_ while I’m in the shower?!” he demanded.

“That’s y—?” the Eleventh Doctor paused, reconsidered, and shook his head. “Never mind: of _course_ that’s you.”

“Why the operatic voice?” the Thirteenth Doctor wondered.

“Because that is the only true way to project the very depths of Mr. Mistoffelees’ soul-searching journey!” the Sixth Doctor insisted.

“I think you have a rather lovely voice, actually,” the Seventh Doctor chimed in.

“Yes, well,” the Sixth Doctor’s bluster faded mildly at the praise, “thank you. I always knew you were a Doctor of discerning taste. However, the fact remains that this is a clear, egregious violation of my privacy, in some of my most intimate, unguarded moments, and—”

The Fourth Doctor cut him off. “It was recorded,” he drawled laconically, “from _my_ room. Two whole rooms over. That’s how loud it gets.”

“Oh…surely not?” The Sixth Doctor had the decency to blush.

“Sure _ly_ ,” someone grumbled, and it sounded rather a lot like it had come from the Master’s monitor.

Whatever the explanation, the Sixth Doctor’s interpretive opera was having the wanted effect. Rassilon instinctively tried to clutch his ears first, even though that wasn’t the way physics worked in the Outer Matrix. Then, when that didn’t work – and out of sheer frustration at himself for having tried it – he blasted the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS clear across the Matrix, which did, indeed, have the intended consequences.

“Enough!” Rassilon’s telepathic voice boomed. He extended one hand, and bands of golden light flew forth, capturing the Master gestalt about the waist and binding him in place. “We have been more than patient, given you chance upon chance to repent. No more! We shall end this _now_!”

Rassilon’s gestalt lunged for the Master’s, glove first, attempting to erase all of him from existence in one go. The only problem was that somewhere along the way the Master had obtained countless experiences at getting himself out of tied ropes. His hands came up to catch Rassilon’s wrist beneath the glove at the last minute, and the two of them interlocked, vying like giants on a colossal scale. Sparks of gold and purple met where their hands grappled, exploding into shining bright supernovas that lit up the entire infinite sweep of the Matrix.

“You know,” the Thirteenth Doctor decided, “Rassilon may have a point: this _has_ gone on long enough. I think, just in general, Rassilon’s got a bit too big for his britches, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You have an idea?” asked the Fourth, whose TARDIS was still limping stutteringly back towards the battle.

“Well, I’ve got loads of Chameleon Arches networked together over here”—the Thirteenth Doctor pointed back over her shoulder into some corner of the console room that none of them could see on the view screen—“so I reckon I could turn anything into anything, and it seems like about time that someone cut Rassilon down to size, if you catch my drift?”

Normal minds, of course, wouldn’t. But these minds were all Doctors, and over lifetimes of experiences, they had all endured these exact same terrible puns in countless regenerations.

“Right!” the Twelfth Doctor said, eyes widening in realisation. “Everyone queue up?”

In something almost resembling order (although not entirely because some of the TARDISes came in sideways or diagonally or upside-down and, of course, one of those TARDISes was, in fact, a whale), the TARDISes spun down into the melee below filing in to form a straight-ish line.

The Thirteenth Doctor wheeled back above them (and high above her was still the First Doctor’s TARDIS: what _was_ going on up there? But, no, no time to think about that!). “All right, everyone,” she said, “look at the camera!” She flicked three switches on the network of Chameleon Arches (and flung her coat over one circuit that started sparking to douse the flames before it could set everything else on fire), and dashed back to the console. A quick scan of the readings showed that the Chameleon Arches were amplifying each other in series perfectly, creating a huge amount of transmogrifying energy that was feeding directly into the main power grid. “Three, two, one,” she said rotating her TARDIS 27 degrees so that the outflow valves would aim right up with the other Doctor’s TARDIS. “Say cheese!” She yanked down the lever to vent all the Chameleon Arch energy like a giant laser beam straight for the Doctors’ assembled TARDISes.

“What in Gallifrey’s name are you doing?” the Master’s telepathic voice sighed, as the line of TARDISes just above his head shimmered and transformed under the Chameleon Network’s influence. And then the collective Masters laughed out in shocked recognition.

“What _is_ that thing?” Rassilon’s gestalt demanded, as all the TARDISes merged into one solid object, shaped roughly like a pen, and approximately the size of two of their enormous hand-spans.

The object fell and spun, and the Master gestalt reached out and caught it with practiced ease. “This,” he informed Rassilon, “is a dear old friend of mine. I call it the Tissue Compression Eliminator. It transforms you from being a giant pain in my arse”—he fired the TARDISes-turned-TCE straight into the Rassilon gestalt’s face at point-blank range and smirked as Rassilon shrunk downwards and downwards with an infuriated cry—“into the insignificant little pest that you actually are.”

Rassilon continued to shrink smaller and smaller. The Thirteenth Doctor tilted her TARDIS far down, until Rassilon could be seen only as a tiny golden dot way down at the very bottom of the Matrix.

The Master gestalt considered the TCE in his palm, made up of the vast majority of Doctors and their TARDISes. “A creative solution as always, my dear. I suppose I should thank you for taking my own preferences into consideration just this once and not turning yourself in some useless sonic device.” The Masters purred seductively at the back of the Doctors’ minds, which usually was a sign that they was about to do something particularly nasty. But instead the Master gestalt flipped over the TCE, found the fob-watch concealed in the base, and flicked it open with their thumb. Light swirled into the giant TCE, and then suddenly it broke apart into the million TARDISes it really was. “Do join me for the finale. I’ve arranged it especially for you.” Those words were also usually a sign that the Master was about to do something particularly nasty.

The Master gestalt dissolved then, back into a trillion little purple lights, and all of them dove down into the abyss of the Matrix, chasing after Rassilon’s final light.

“You know what?” the Fifth Doctor said over the intercom, sounding remarkably chipper. “I think that’s finally sorted my TARDIS: not a blowhole in sight!”

“I,” the Twelfth Doctor's voice said shakily, “am never doing that again.” He glared at the Thirteenth. “Next time, I trigger the change, and _you_ turn into the unnecessarily-confusingly-named device.”

“Right,” the Thirteenth Doctor agreed, “next time.” Like that was ever going to become their new weekend pastime. “Shall we?”

The TARDISes dove down and down – “Actually, on second thought, a whale would be handy right about now…” – until they reached, in the deep, dark depths of the Matrix, what looked like an infinite plain of snow, broken only by dark patches that turned out to be evergreens upon flying closer and, inexplicably, odd gargantuan pieces of fruit placed at random intervals throughout the snow-covered woods. With some puzzlement, the Doctors headed for what looked like a pear roughly the size of a small house, beside which the one golden light stood, with a multitude of purple lights forming half a ring around it.

The TARDISes alighted around the congregation of biodata lights, and without a single Doctor bothering to check the sensors, they all bounded out onto the odd, wintery landscape. Thankfully, whatever this environment was, it seemed to have the same atmosphere and physical laws as Gallifrey, although if the Doctors stopped to think on it, it was rather odd that it did.

The Twelfth Doctor made a face as he looked around the slightly off-putting winter wonderland. “Did we have to do this right beside the giant pear?” he demanded. “Look, there’s a lovely apple over that way.”

One by one, the purple lights fizzled, and the Masters’ Time-Lord bodies appeared in their stead. Missy, it happened to turn out, had been one of the lights nearest him. “Yes,” she insisted, “it really does have to be right beside the giant pear.”

“Just to annoy me?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she agreed, with teeth.

“I don’t mean to be alarmist, but was _is_ this place?” the Fifth Doctor asked, looking distinctly alarmed anyway as, off to one side, what looked like a herd of reindeer paused in their grazing upon the evergreen boughs when a robin alighted upon one of the branches. The reindeers’ eyes glowed a menacing red and equally red lasers – looking remarkably like K-9’s, if truth be told – emerged from their noses. They zapped the robin to the ground where it lay dead.

“Don’t look!” the Thirteenth Master said. “It’s meant to be your Christmas card, but we’re not finished with it yet.”

“Oh, right.” The Fifth Doctor paused. “Why did cyborg reindeer just murder a robin again?”

“Dead robins are an Earth tradition on Christmas cards,” the Thirteenth Master insisted. “I thought you’d appreciate the attention to detail.”

“And the giant fruit?” the Thirteenth Doctor asked, gaping at the monumental pear.

“They’re meant to be ornaments, but they’re unfortunately a bit dimensionally transcendental at the moment,” the Twentieth Master sighed. “I told you it was still a work in progress!”

“Right…”

The Tenth Doctor had bent down to pick up some of the snow-like substance on his fingertips and – naturally – immediately licked it. “Oh look, it’s actually snow!” he said in surprise.

The Eighteenth Master blushed. “Yes, well… We know it would be more culturally accurate to use the ashes of Krampus, to commemorate human parents burning him alive in their chimneys before he could eat their children, but… We know you like snow. So we adapted it.”

“Beautiful!” the Tenth Doctor beamed. “We _love_ snow.” Then his face fell. “But could you maybe get rid of the pear, though?”

“Yes, yes!” the Eighteenth Master snapped. “We’ll get rid of the pear! We promise! Will you stop harping on the bloody pear?”

“ _Ahem_.” At the very centre of the circle of Masters and Doctors, still roughly twice the height of the average Time Lord, even after all that TCEing, was Rassilon’s shrunken gestalt, who seemed mildly irked at being so completely ignored.

The Doctors and Masters turned back to face him.

The golden lights in Rassilon trembled, and he’d crumpled to his knees, as if he was finally actually injured. But as they all watched, he rose slowly to his feet so that he towered before them all. “All your tricks, all your cleverness, all your annoying, childish nonsense,” he spat, his thoughts harsh and discordant against their minds, no longer even pretending at civility anymore, “and it was all for nothing. We live. We shall always live. And while we write the laws of the Matrix, there is no way for you to win. There is only death for you, eternal this time.”

“Oh no,” Missy said in bored-sounding monotone, “I am shaking in my booties. Say it ain’t so!”

Across the circle from her, the Eighteenth Master snorted, “He’s all talk. Always has been.” He affected a snooty tone. “Always _shalt be_!”

“Come, come,” the Thirteenth Master said coldly, “no more games. If you were capable of killing any of us, you surely would have done so by now.”

“The Matrix won’t let him!” the Twentieth Master said with a deranged giggle. “Not even him!”

Rassilon, finally provoked beyond reason, let out a growl that shook the entire Matrix from its foundations. Rassilon’s rage shook the snow from the evergreen boughs down in the bowels of the Matrix where they all stood. It echoed through the array of mindscapes above where the Valeyard still watched their confrontation with interest. And, finally, it streamed out all the way up to the very top, where the adolescent Doctor’s TARDIS still hovered, watching and waiting.

The adolescent Master breathed in rapt fascination, “Here it comes…”

And then, all the way back down at the base, the laws of physics in the Matrix suddenly shifted. The Doctors and Masters felt an oppressive weight suddenly dragging their limbs down. Most struggled not to drop to their knees.

Rassilon let out a triumphant cry, and the golden lights that defined his humanoid form were suddenly laced through with pitch black. “We have indulged you long enough!” he announced. “We had thought preserving your powers, for our own later use, might be worth some small fraction of our attention. But you had to be insufferable! Had to try our patience time and again!”

Neither Doctors nor Masters argued, mostly because they couldn't move or breathe with Rassilon holding them frozen in place, but also because they were all forced to agree that, yes, that was a fair assessment of them both.

“No more of your games!” Rassilon said. “With this,” he closed his eyes shut tight, and slotted both their biodata onto the Matrix’s purge drives, “you are gone. Goodbye, Doctor, Master! You most certainly will not be missed!”

And he pulled the plug, literally this time, on them all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credits:
> 
> Goo-Snake ASCII art adapted/modified from designs on [this site](https://ascii.co.uk/art/snake).
> 
> Also, the notion of the Fifth Doctor's TARDIS thinking it's a whale is not mine. Props for that go to the Short Trip 'The Deep', which is one of my all-time faves. ♥ Stories like that are why I can never decide whether to label my fic crack-fic or not, because if Doctor Who itself is like that, what would actually count as crack in such a universe? :P


	3. The Trap

“No more of your games!” Rassilon said. “With this,” he closed his eyes shut tight, and slotted both their biodata onto the Matrix’s purge drives, “you are gone. Goodbye, Doctor, Master! You most certainly will not be missed!”

And he pulled the plug, literally this time, on them all.

Rassilon opened his eyes with a contented sigh of triumph. But then impossibly, before him, there was still a gaggle of irritating Masters and troublesome Doctors amidst the softly falling snow. He frowned, pressed the Matrix’s mental delete button again. Nothing happened. What, was the ‘button’ stuck, or was the stupid subroutine hanging? He tried deleting the Doctor and Master again and again, and still nothing happened.

“Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on again?” one of the Doctors chimed in cheekily.

“Shut. Up!” Rassilon shouted and tried very, very hard, repeatedly, to wipe them all out with a thought.

High above them, in the adolescent Doctor’s TARDIS, the adolescent Master finally pulled back away from the TARDIS doors with a smug smile. “Got it!” he crowed, and dashed over to the console.

“Just what are you up to?” the adolescent Doctor asked, which really was a question he should have asked long before now, but he was still inexperienced in these matters. In due time, his complete and unwavering mistrust in the Master would grow to swift and epic proportions.

“Never mind that,” the adolescent Master waved him off. “You don’t want to miss any more of the fun, do you?”

The Doctor thought (correctly) that he wasn’t quite certain that he wanted to answer yes to that, but too late because the adolescent Master had already dematerialised, and when they rematerialised again, they were upon the same demented Christmas-card-scape as Rassilon and the rest of the Doctors and Masters.

The adolescent Master dashed through the snow to the front of the crowd, with the adolescent Doctor hot on his heels, and the two of them came to a sudden halt of gangly limbs beside the Thirteenth Master.

“Are we ready to show our hand now?” he asked his younger self with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, sir! I mean, me.” The adolescent Master kicked himself mentally for the slip: soooo embarrassing.

Rassilon looked back and forth between the two of them, baffled. He’d stopped trying to execute them, but he still hadn’t the faintest idea why he couldn’t, beyond the fact that the Doctor and the Master were such intolerable pests that clearly one or the other or both of them was responsible.

The Thirteenth Master chuckled to himself, clearly enjoying his moment. For just a second, Rassilon felt some kinship with him: as another recurring villain, he too enjoyed foolishly revealing all his plans at great and elaborate length.

“What was it you said?” the Thirteenth Master asked rhetorically. “Something along the lines of: while you write the laws of the Matrix, there is no way I can win. Was that it?”

Rassilon nodded. “That is the unassailable truth. I am still Matrix Lord, and hence my word is the Word of God.” The Word of God’s delete key still didn’t seem to be working, though; Rassilon tried it again, just to be sure.

“Try kicking it,” Missy stage-whispered at him. “I’ve heard that helps.”

“A _hem_!” the Thirteenth Master glared at her.

“Right, sorry, didn’t mean to steal your thunder,” she said, backing off in possibly the one situation of all of space and time where she would ever agree to do so.

The Thirteenth Master cleared his throat again. “ _Unassailable_ truth, you say. Such an intriguing choice of words. Shall we walk through the logic together, a bit of sophistry, perhaps?”

The Third Doctor made a sour face. “Oh, won’t someone stop him?” he complained. “I’m honestly not sure which of them is the more insufferable.”

“Shh!” all the other Masters hushed him.

“First of all, what is the Matrix?” the Thirteenth Master asked, strutting around like an overly proud peacock in a way that would shame even the Sixth Doctor. “A computer connected to a power source, at its very base, to use primitive analogues. Would you agree?”

Rassilon sneered at him. “To use _very_ primitive analogues,” he conceded with a nod of his head.

“And within our primitive analogues, there are two ways to delete data, correct? The first is internal: some code, or a script, that erases bytes, as exemplified by that tasteless glove you wear.”

Rassilon popped his knuckles in that glove, as if preparing to lunge at the Thirteenth Master and try killing him that way if he didn’t get to the point soon.

“And the other – your flaccid little delete button – is external: just chuck out the hardware that stores our data, disconnect it from the power source, burn it afterwards if you’re feeling especially paranoid.” The Thirteenth Master paused in his lecture to raise an eyebrow at Rassilon. “You are following, I trust?”

“Yes!” Rassilon hissed angrily.

“How is it, then, that we Masters have stopped you? You are – for now, as you say – still the Matrix Lord. The only thing that could have prevented you”—the Thirteenth Master shivered, savouring the moment—“is if we’re not in the Matrix at all.”

Guilty little deranged giggles sounded behind the hands of several of the Masters in the crowd, as they attempted to contain their glee at just how naughty they’d all been.

“ _What_?” asked a fair number of Doctors, because even they couldn’t follow this bizarre twist in the Master’s insane logic.

“That,” Rassilon said haughtily, “is ridiculous.” He gestured around them at what was obviously the Outer Matrix above: the various security bots whizzing by overhead, the array of Time-Lord mindscapes, and up way at the top the command centre with its data feeds that sent in fresh biodata to Gallifrey from throughout the real universe. “We are most certainly in the Matrix.”

“We most certainly are in _a_ Matrix,” the Thirteenth Master corrected, “but not yours.”

“There _is_ only one Matrix!” Rassilon retorted.

“ _Was_ only one Matrix. We’ve built ourselves a new one: a perfect copy, from the Eye of Harmony right on up through the Cloisters to the biodata extractors. A parallel Matrix, if you will. Running out of sight and out of mind, just waiting for one of us – or two of us, as the case may be”—the Thirteenth Master gestured to the Eighteenth Master and Missy in acknowledgement—“to flick the switch so that all the data – the bits and bops and minds and memories – transferred via the universe’s greatest data upload from your Matrix back on Gallifrey into _my_ Matrix here. We have, in effect, _stolen_ your Matrix. I would say I’m sorry…” The Thirteenth Master laughed, relishing the moment. “But I’m genuinely not.”

Rassilon looked actually spooked for one instant, but then he scoffed. “That’s impossible! We would all have known if you’d moved us.”

“Would we?” The War Doctor frowned, cutting in. “Because I had the High Council move my databanks, and none of my past selves felt it.”

“In point of fact,” the Eighth Doctor agreed, “when one is nothing but data, one can’t really feel anything above that data-layer. Take any sort of portable computer: if you carry the physical computer from the console room to the library and back, do the programs on the computer know that? Of course not.” He let out a delighted laugh. “Oh, that really is a delightful philosophical problem!”

“Even if I accept that preposterous conclusion,” Rassilon insisted, “the premise it is built on is fundamentally flawed. You”—he pointed an accusing finger at the Master—“cannot ‘carry about’ this ‘portable computer’ whilst you yourself are in the Matrix. You are all dead, ghosts, nothing but data to feed into _my_ Matrix.”

“You know,” the Thirteenth Master agreed, stroking his beard thoughtfully, “you’re right. Masters and Mistresses?” he asked, raising his voice as if to signal of a choir. “Why, it’s almost as if…”

“We must’ve started the plan while alive, way back in the day,” said the adolescent Master.

“To power our own Matrix, we’d need a duplicate, functioning copy of the Eye of Harmony, so we’d have had to dedicate several of our lives, post-Academy, to studying black holes and stellar engineering,” spoke up the Second Master.

“Eventually, we’d have to go renegade, of course,” added the Sixth Master. “Building a second Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey would create all sorts of unwanted attention – albeit mostly from post-docs desperate to get published. We’d have to run off, find a far abandoned corner of the universe, and work in secret.”

“And, of course,” the Thirteenth Master took his place in the chronological sequence, “that’s merely the power issue. Once we were done there, a certain _someone_ would need to spend a good number of his years sneaking about beneath the capital, checking technical specifications and hacking into the Matrix to steal schematics.”

“And, even after the system was all built,” the War Master continued from him, “there’s still the data issue. In order to trick the Time Lords into handing over the master data-transfer codes to copy that, a certain handsome enterprising Time Lord would need to wait until the High Council was at its most desperate, willing to make a devil’s bargain.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Now, it seems to me there was just such a crisis in my lifespan, as it happens! What was that called again? Ah yes: the _Time War_.”

“At that point,” said the Eighteenth Master, “all that would remain would be to steal a duplicate Matrix backend. All I’d need would be for _someone_ ,” he coughed pointedly, “to remove the Time Lock so that I could return the Gallifrey to do so. And then that same _someone_ ,” he coughed again, “to remove the Time Lock a second time so that I could get back off.”

“Ooh!” the Tenth Doctor said with a grin. “That’s me!”

“And me!” The Eleventh raised his hand excited.

“Yes, darlings,” the Eighteenth Master said with an eye roll, “you’re brilliant.”

“Of course,” Missy chimed in, “to continue this extremely hypothetical and in-no-way-real-whatsoever operation, we’d have to do a bit of beta testing. Say, try out a mini-copy of our own Matrix on some little insignificant world that no one cares about. Or at least no one with any basic sense of taste.” She narrowed her eyes pointedly at the Twelfth Doctor, who glared straight back in defence of his precious blue ball of mud.

“…At which point one would only need to return to Gallifrey, seize control of the Matrix archive, and rewire it to redirect all biodata to the alternate Matrix instead,” said the Twentieth Master.

“So, you see,” the Thirteenth Master summed it all up tidily, “you are absolutely correct, for once. It _would_ be absolutely impossible to do all this from within the Matrix. We would’ve had to have been planning it _all our lives_.”

“Fine, fine!” Rassilon snapped, clearly unimpressed. “I concede that, in theory, if all these absurd, implausible hypotheticals had occurred, then a second Matrix could, indeed, exist, and that would explain why I cannot destroy you all.”

“You’re wiping the disk on the wrong computer, so to speak,” the Thirteenth Master agreed, “but please continue to do so all you like.”

“However,” Rassilon concluded, “the theory is still nonsense. Because _no one_ would bother to go to these irrational lengths! What motivation could you possibly have for doing so?”

“Because, my dear,” the Thirteenth Master said with a knowing chuckle, “there was something in _your_ Matrix that belongs to _us_.”

And that was the moment when every single Doctor _got_ it, and they all face-palmed simultaneously.

Rassilon looked around at the Doctors, baffled. “Am I missing something?” he asked, suddenly developing a sneaking, disturbing suspicion that he was missing _everything_.

“Oh no…”

“No, no, no…”

“You’re mad. You Masters are all absolutely mad!”

“What is it?” Rassilon asked, feeling awkwardly left out.

“Doctor,” the Thirteenth Master extended his hand towards them, “if you’ll do the honours?”

The Doctors explained in multipart, horrified harmony: “You see…” “…he didn’t steal the _Matrix_ …” “…of course not, why would he care about that…” “…he stole _us_ …” “…and you, Rassilon…” “…and all the rest of this…” “…are just collateral damage…” “…and, believe me, we are _so sorry_ about this…” “…he does this all the time, you know…” “…can’t take him anywhere…” “…right, sorry, we’re sorry, so _so_ sorry!”

“Take note, Doctor,” the Thirteenth Master said smugly, “this is how it’s done _right_. None of your spur-of-the-moment, impulsive requests to the High Council. Not that rickety passageway built in the cupboards. This is thousands upon thousands of years of careful planning. Now, admit it, at long last: _I did it better_!”

Several Doctors muttered under their breath in grudging acknowledgement.

Rassilon gaped at the Doctors. “What, this is all an act of cosmic, childish one-upmanship? You actually _believe_ this outlandishness?”

“Oh, yes.” “Absolutely.” “No question.” “Perfectly in character.” “Far from the most outlandish thing they’ve ever done, even.” “Surprised they didn’t end it with ‘nyah-nyah’, actually.”

Rassilon sputtered. “What in Gallifrey’s Great Name is _wrong_ with you? With both of you?”

The Doctors and the Masters looked at each other and blinked. “Right…” “Well, that’s a long story, isn’t it?” “Yeah, you’d probably get bored.” “No one wants to rehash all _that_ again!”

Rassilon found himself in the sudden entirely unique position of feeling like a bit of a third wheel, as though he were interrupting someone else’s story entirely. It was a rather lonely feeling. How odd, given that he’d built up an entire civilisation around deifying isolation. He’d never felt like there was anything missing _before_.

Rassilon reached out mentally, feeling himself suddenly uncertain. He had thought these two no-names beneath his notice, but clearly he had underestimated the sheer ridiculous lengths they would go to. Yet still, all the knowledge of time and space and Gallifrey was his to command, and he dug into it to prepare himself for the battle that was to come. One by one, he queried the minds of the Doctors and Masters’ contemporaries, and received the following series of discouraging advice: “The Doctor and the Master? Whatever do you, do _not_ get directly between them!” “Run. Cut your loses right now and run. They are forces of nature and cannot be stopped nor reasoned with.” “Oh no, not _them_! They ruin _everything_. Always have done.” “You got yourself caught in the middle of one of their games? You poor, poor bastard…”

The next second, Rassilon shook the thoughts off: weak, foolish notions from weak, foolish Time Lords! He steadied himself once again. “Be that as it may,” he said, focusing his energies again and honing them upon his fingertips, “as you have said, there are two manners of my destroying you. Destroying you from without is, perhaps,” he grumbled to admit it, “no longer within my purview. But destroying you from within?” Lightning sparked from his glove. “That, I believe, still only requires admin access, does it not?”

Missy pouted. “Hmm, that’s true, isn’t it?”

“You see, we were hoping that maybe, just _maybe_ …” the Eighteenth Master said, imploring.

“…You’d give us the admin codes, and then fuck off and die?” the Twentieth Master asked hopefully.

“ _Pretty please_?” Missy asked, clasping her hands before her pleadingly and fluttering her eyelashes.

Rassilon screamed with rage and aimed a solid blast of energy straight through the centre of her head. She dodged, but he caught her with his backhand, knocking her down into the snow. With a snarl, he knelt over Missy’s fallen body and thrusted his gloved fist straight for her head once more. However, very luckily for her, she happened to be wearing one of her more audacious hats that day and had her hair up in a high bun. She jerked her head quickly to one side, and Rassilon’s glove caught her hat and a section of her hair, but missed all the vital face and brain bits.

Her hat crumbled into raw violet embers and then dissolved into ash. The air reeked of the scent of burnt hair, and the remains of Missy’s severed locks fell down onto her forehead on one side, no longer long enough to fit into her bun.

“That was my favourite hat!” she exclaimed, more outraged at that than at the rather ridiculous bob she now sported on one side of her head.

Amid the circle of the Doctors (who were all carefully planning to strategically run away), the Twelfth Doctor gave the Tenth Doctor a hopeful double thumbs up.

The Tenth Doctor just shook his head: “Just admit it. You completely failed in your mission to stop their ridiculous hats.”

The Twelfth Doctor’s shoulders slumped in acknowledgement of this fair criticism.

Beside Missy’s head, Rassilon pulled his glove back from the tiny crater it had just melted into the snow. However, before Rassilon could strike again, the War Master caught Rassilon’s gloved arm from behind. He and Rassilon pulled against each other, but Rassilon was far superior in size and strength. Rassilon rose up to his full height, leaving the War Master dangling helplessly from his arm. Missy, meanwhile, rolled to the side, somersaulting through the snow again and again as if her very life depended upon it (which, it so happened, it did).

Rassilon flung his shoulders back, knocking the War Master free, and then twisted sharply to catch the War Master’s arm within his gloved fist. The War Master _screamed_ when the glove burned straight through his shoulder, erasing him from the arm outwards.

The Eighteenth and Twentieth Masters dove in and tackled Rassilon from behind, yanking his arm away and pulling him back off the War Master, so that the War Master could stagger off with the remainder of his body.

The War Master looked down with some shock to see that his arm was burned straight through. There was nothing but a gaping black void where his shoulder should’ve been. The edges of hole flickered with sparkles of purple light where his biodata had been severed.

“Here!” the War Doctor beckoned to him, and then rushed forwards while the Eighteenth and Twentieth Masters continued to wrestle against Rassilon. “Quick, this way!” He caught the War Master under his one remaining shoulder, and limped back with him out of Rassilon’s reach.

“That,” the War Master said, voice sounding almost numb with the shock, “actually really _hurts_ , quite a lot.”

“Shh, you big baby,” the War Doctor scoffed. “You’ll be fine.”

“You are such an exquisite liar,” the War Master smiled at him fondly. “You don’t know whether I’ll be fine at all.”

“You’ll be fine,” the War Doctor repeated anyway.

In the meantime, Rassilon thrashed between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Masters. He finally threw off the Twentieth with a crackle of energy, and then used his free arm to shove his gloved hand squarely into the Eighteenth Master’s chest, right over one of his hearts.

The Eighteenth Master convulsed in his grip, eyes rolling back in his head and whites showing, as his chest was burned clean through. The creeping blackness spread over his torso, ever outwards, also taking one of his arms and part of a leg, until _finally_ several of the younger Masters were able to get a clear shot and blasted Rassilon to one side.

The half of the Eighteenth Master that still remained fell to the ground in a lifeless heap. In the crowd of Doctors, the Tenth Doctor screamed and tried to rush towards him, and it took a good half dozen other Doctors to finally tackle him to the ground and stop him for running headfirst to his certain death.

Rassilon staggered but rose again easily, still unharmed although the Masters had thrown everything at him time and time again. “ _This_ ,” he informed them, “is what it means to be a Matrix Lord! Relocate the Matrix, steal it, it matters not! If I can’t destroy you the easy way, then I will hunt down every last one of you and pick you off one by one!” He stalked over to where the Twentieth Master had fallen to the ground still unconscious, and towered over him. He raised his gloved hand and plunged it downwards, right into the Twentieth Master’s throat.

At the last minute, another barrage of psychic energy from the surrounding Masters hit Rassilon squarely in the chest, knocking him backwards so that he crashed back into the giant pear-shaped bauble. His hand had missed the Twentieth Master’s neck by mere inches. Several of the younger Masters quickly ran forwards, caught the Twentieth Master by the armpits, and dragged him back.

Rassilon laughed. “ _Run_!” he ordered. “Run, and maybe you’ll have a few hours or days or years, knowing that I am _always_ coming for you and—”

“Excuse me?” the Eighth Doctor suddenly coughed very loudly.

Rassilon frowned at him. The Eighth Doctor didn’t look properly intimidated at all; instead, he looked rather amused.

“What?” Rassilon demanded, despite himself.

“It’s just that,” the Eighth Doctor said, “I feel that I should mention at this point that we’ve all quite forgotten about somebody.”

“What are you talking about?” Rassilon demanded.

And then from behind him, a voice smarmed in his ear, uncomfortably close: “Hello, you!”

Rassilon spun to see the Fourteenth Master’s supremely annoying face smirking at him, without a care in the world, from mere inches away, having apparently just rounded the giant pear where it seemed he had been hiding in wait all along.

“Oopsie!” the Fourteenth Master said, and pressed the red button on the small device in his hand.

The pear-ornament behind them shook, parted, and suddenly split, to reveal that the bauble they stood beside was not in fact a giant mistakenly dimensionally-transcendental pear at all, but had instead concealed the miniaturised Eye of Harmony that the Fourteenth Master had spent all those eons lovingly recreating in the Matrix.

Rassilon had one perfect moment when he realised that, in fact, the Masters had been _planning_ this, had spent all that time and energy and sacrificed their incarnations deliberately to back him up onto exactly this one spot. And then he let out a startled shriek as both he and the Fourteenth Master were plunged straight down into the black hole, the Fourteenth Master squealing with delight all the way.

Rassilon scrambled and struggled against the gravitational torsion as it ripped him apart: first back into his separate individual incarnations, and then each of those into subatomic smears of former data.

“Isn’t this fu-u-u-u-un?” the Fourteenth Master’s mental voice sounded ahead, as gleeful as a child on a playground slide.

Rassilon tried to grab him or murder him or anything, but his being was literally ripped to nothing. His mind stretched out wider and wider until it felt as though it would snap, infinitely thin. “I’ll get you for this!” he screamed telepathically to the Fourteenth Master.

“You’ll have to catch me first!” The Fourteenth Master blew a mental raspberry his way, and dove down deliberately faster and deeper into the black hole, as if he _enjoyed_ committing suicide, the absolute maniac!

But there! Far in the distance, Rassilon could see a white light, an end to infinite void that had sucked them inside. There was an _exit_. Of course there was; not even the Master was this insane.

The Fourteenth Master’s body reformed in front of him, as the white hole loomed closer ahead. “Whee!” the Fourteenth Master laughed, and did a little pirouette for no reason whatsoever as he passed back out through the event horizon.

Rassilon reached forward, watching his hand just start to reconstitute before him as his molecules pulled back together.

And then, outside the Eye of Harmony, where the Fourteenth Master had just tumbled free into the Eighth Doctor’s waiting arms, he pushed his little red button a second time. The trans-temporal combination lock on the Eye of Harmony snapped shut, and the now-pear-shaped (literally) transcendental shell that covered it fastened into place, trapping Rassilon inside, at the centre.

Slowly, Rassilon fell backwards back into the very core of the black hole, as the light before him suddenly vanished with the door slamming closed. His mind expanded and expanded, ripped apart and then stopped, right at the fulcrum, on the deepest, darkest point. A pivot point, in fact, where the mind was so infinitely stretched that it was no longer even aware. It was nothing.

And there Rassilon hovered in eternal suspended animation.

No mind, no body, no insidious will.

Just nothing.

Trapped.

Locked away.

Forever.

***

Outside, the Fourteenth Master brushed the snow off his trousers and bounded up to his feet. “Well, that was a lark!” he said. “I hated to do it,” he lied, with an obviously fake pout, “really I did, but after all we _did_ ask him to fuck off and die very politely, and he refused.”

The Eighth Doctor glared at him, hands on hips.

“Oh, come now, beautiful!” the Fourteenth Master cajoled. “I just killed _Rassilon_! Doesn’t that at least earn me a kiss?”

“You,” the Eighth Doctor accused, jabbing him in the chest with one fingertip, “just ruined my favourite sex toy! Not only is Rassilon inside now, but it’s a _pear_!”

An awkward silence fell. In the back, someone coughed.

The Eighth Doctor turned on his heel and stalked off in a furious huff.

The Fourteenth Master’s face fell, and then he quickly chased after the Eighth Doctor. “Really?” he asked worriedly. “You liked it _that_ much?”

The rest of the Doctors and Masters watched the two of them leave, seemingly oblivious to all else. Far off in the distance now, the Fourteenth Master’s voice could be heard begging, “Well, I had to pick _something_ that I knew you’d stay safely back away from!” and then as few seconds later even more contritely: “What if I made you a _new_ one?”

At that point, however, the rest of the Doctors and Masters’ attention was pulled back to the Tenth Doctor, who finally pulled free of the rest of him with a cry, and fell frantically upon the Eighteenth Master’s mangled body, searching wildly for life signs.

To one side, the War Doctor and the War Master were caught up in a less extreme version of the same drama. The War Doctor had shrugged off his coat and now ripped a long strip of fabric free. He tied it around the black void where the War Master’s upper arm should’ve been. Strangely, even though the middle section of his arm was completely absent, the War Master had no difficulty moving the fingers at the end of the severed limb, as if there was still some invisible tether that connected it to the rest of his body.

The War Master raised his fingers and wiggled them experimentally before his eyes. “Matrix physics…” he said, sounding a bit bemused by it all.

“Hold still, will you?” the War Doctor snapped, and succeeded in wrapping the tourniquet around the War Master’s arm. “Not that it’s doing much good…” he muttered. “There’s no wound, no bleeding, just a hole. At least this way, though, it looks less disturbing when you do _that_.” He tied off the fabric so that it created a visible bulk that disguised the War Master’s missing anatomy.

The War Master flapped his arm and, indeed, if one didn’t know the arm was severed, one might never have guessed. “You are a terrible doctor, do you know that?” he said.

The War Doctor clutched him close and fought back some messy emotion or other at what he’d almost lost, again.

“Oh, there, there, my dear,” the War Master said almost comfortingly and clutched the War Doctor just as tightly to him. “You were right, you know. I _will_ be all right.” He patted the War Doctor on the back with his disembodied hand.

On the other side of the now-sealed Eye of Harmony, the Thirteenth Doctor watched them – and the Tenth Doctor’s breakdown behind them – with a little furrow between her brows. However, she instead walked over to the Twentieth Master, who was now regaining consciousness. She snorted as she looked him up and down once, and then said in her least-caring voice, “Still alive, then?”

“Aww, Doctor,” he teased, “I didn’t know you cared!”

She snorted again. “Knew I couldn’t have got that lucky.” But her frown deepened as a strangled wail sounded from the Tenth Doctor’s throat, like some sort of wounded beast, where he had now collapsed atop the Eighteenth Master’s remains.

“Ouch,” the Twentieth Master said in an entirely unsympathetic tone, “that doesn’t sound good, does it?”

The Thirteenth Doctor sighed and sat down beside him. She sniffed twice.

He turned to look at her.

“If you wanted…” she began slowly.

“Yes?” he asked hopefully.

“You could probably hold me right now, and I wouldn’t object.” She sniffed again.

“Oh?” he asked cautiously, and slid an arm around her shoulders, just a little too eager and quick out the gate to properly feign indifference.

She leaned into him and rested her head against his shoulder. “Don’t,” she said very sternly, “ever do that to me again.”

“Oh,” he repeated, and then: “Okay.”

He was _such_ a liar.

***

“Well…” the Third Doctor said, and pursed his lips like he’d swallowed a lemon as he watched the various Doctors and Masters attend to their injured, “that was certainly a fiasco.” Despite his undoubtedly noble intentions otherwise, he had nonetheless gravitated to the Thirteenth Master’s general vicinity. “I hope that spectacle was worth it to _you_ , at least. I noticed you kept yourself well out of danger at all times.”

The Thirteenth Master chuckled in acknowledgement at this. “We all had our agreed-upon roles to play,” he insisted. “I have fewer centuries at my disposal than some of my future selves. They volunteered themselves to fight, just as my Fourteenth volunteered to lurk in waiting to spring his trap that entire time, unable to lend a hand even when we needed him most. Tell me, which job was harder?”

“Well, for one, your Eighteenth seems to be dying or dead, not that you would care,” the Third Doctor said scathingly. “And at least your Fourteenth took his turn. What, exactly, was your part in all this, again? To brag and gloat?”

“My dear Doctor,” the Thirteenth Master turned to face him, “my part was to hold myself back until _now_ , of course…”

“Now?” the Third Doctor frowned. “What do you mean now—?”

“I mean,” the Thirteenth Master said, “that Rassilon is gone, but this is still far from over.”

The Third Doctor’s eyes widened, and at that moment the entire Matrix went on the fritz: everything jolted five inches to the left for one second, and then jolted back another seven inches to the right. “What _was_ that?” the Third Doctor demanded.

The other Doctors froze as well, looking upward to the epicentre of the space-time distortions (with the sole exception of the Tenth Doctor, who was still wailing over the Eighteenth Master, and didn’t care one lick if the entire Matrix fell down around their heads just then). The Masters, meanwhile, turned to the Thirteenth Master for guidance.

The Thirteenth Master stepped forwards, away from the Third Doctor, and looked up to the Matrix overhead. A crack formed, and then a fissure, as the Matrix started to break apart. “That, Doctor,” he said, “is a critical fault in the Matrix’s programming. You see, the system is not designed to function without an administrator. It _needs_ a Matrix Lord. And we have so cruelly deprived it of one.”

Beneath them, the ground quaked.

“So, what?” the Third Doctor said. “You’ve destroyed us all for…for some petty vendetta against Rassilon?”

The Thirteenth Master turned briefly to give him a long-suffering look. “Honestly, you never give me enough credit! Of course, I haven’t destroyed us all! When the Matrix discovers it lacks a Lord – as it just has – it will reset itself, seek out a _new_ Lord and Master.”

“Oh, poppycock!” the Third Doctor scoffed. “How the devil can you know that?”

“Because,” the Thirteenth Master explained, “another of my selves was tasked with the most thankless, patience-trying, insufferable assignment in all the known universe, one that spanned ages, literally ages. We have,” he paused dramatically, “read the entire Matrix Manual.”

The Third Doctor couldn’t help but be a little impressed. After all, _regular_ manuals were already coma-inducing in and of themselves, but this one would’ve been a manual written by _Time Lords_ , possibly even Rassilon himself! The sheer boredom risked by such a venture must have been truly catastrophic. In fact, given the Masters’ sheer inability to focus on anything that wasn’t the Doctor, the task should have been insurmountable.

“Observe, Doctor, here it comes: my final moment of triumph!”

And then _something_ changed within the Matrix.

‘Something’ was the only word for it, really. It didn’t feel like anything in the real world, or anything in the Matrix the Doctors had experienced thus far. In some ways, it felt like a door or window being opened into a pitch-black room: a sudden breeze of air and light and knowledge that the current known configuration of one’s surroundings had fundamentally changed. Or perhaps it was like being suddenly given a new sense: different avenues for perceiving reality arose, reconfiguring how one interacted with the world. It might have flashed like a rush of power or opened like a shuttle bay or split apart like a murmuration of starlings around a diving falcon. Any of those might have been appropriate visual metaphors, but instead the Doctors and the Masters saw it as a giant flashing command prompt, high above their heads in the Matrix:

C:\MATRIX\system>adminlogin

SYSTEM ERROR: ADMIN not found. Enter new ADMIN biodata for system recovery_  
  
---  
  
The Thirteenth Master side-eyed the Doctor. “Tell me that’s not an Earth thing?”

“Well,” the Third Doctor admitted sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck, “yes. You see, simple Earth computers—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” the Thirteenth Master said with a sigh of irritation. “I will kindly ignore the fact that you’ve somehow convinced the most advanced system in all of time and space to cosplay as such an obvious inferior. No doubt, the Matrix merely needed to present itself in a form that even a simple mind like yours could comprehend.”

“Hey!” the Third Doctor objected.

“No matter,” the Thirteenth Master said. “I’ll just—” He closed his eyes and placed his biodata onto the cursor. His eyes shot open, and he growled when he saw:

C:\MATRIX\system>adminlogin

SYSTEM ERROR: ADMIN not found. Enter new ADMIN biodata for system recoveryM̷̛̲̟̯̈́͋̾̾̋̀̑̾̿͝͝ǎ̸̡̛̪̹̰͚͉̼̤͍̝̘͋͑̀͋͑̚͝ş̴̖͙̦̜͓̑̄̽͂t̸̢̜̗̱̜̞͎͕̻͈̩̤̍̄͊͌̅̇̈̓̔̅̿͘͠ͅȩ̴̢͉̮̰̯͇͔̲̝̰̗̂̅̈́r̴̡̰̭̠͚̱̥̳̫̤͆̇̐̑̍͐̈́͌́D̸͈̲͓͛͌͑̓͊̎̑̒o̵̢̡̪͇̹̟̩̓̿̿̃̽́͝c̶͚̘̞̗̜̗͕͈̘̼̻̞̬̈̐̏̌͐͒̚͝͠t̸̯̮̳̗̦̻͜ő̵̪̘͚͛̎͛̔͒̃͋̑̔͘r̵̦̺͚̪̤̻̞͑̑̀͌͠

SYSTEM ERROR: Two biodata samples entered.

SYSTEM ERROR: ADMIN not found. Enter new ADMIN biodata for system recovery_   
  
---  
  
“Tell me,” the Thirteenth Master said tightly, “that the second biodata signature that just attempted to log in wasn’t yours?”

“Well, I would,” the Third Doctor said, “but I prefer not to lie.”

The Thirteenth Master let out a frustrated exclamation. “Come now,” he insisted. “You clearly have no interest in becoming the next Matrix Lord. Why, you all but ran screaming when they tried to make you Lord President!”

“All very true,” the Third Doctor agreed, “but…”

“Ah, yes. There’s always one of those with you, isn’t there?”

“I’m not entirely certain I fancy the idea of letting _you_ be the new Matrix Lord instead.”

The Thirteenth Master glared at him, then quickly looked back to the prompt. However, once again, it flashed its error that two rival minds had tried to set themselves as the next ruler of the Matrix at once.

The Third Doctor coughed into his hand and looked like he was hiding a laugh. “Sorry, old chap, but we could do this for all eternity.”

The Thirteenth Master growled. “Why won’t you ever let me have nice things? What can possibly be your objection? _Someone_ needs to be Lord of this new Matrix, or it will—” He cut off abruptly mid-sentence, hoping he’d caught the Doctor off-balance, and tried entering his biodata again.

“No can do, I’m afraid,” the Third Doctor said, cutting him off a third time.

“Is it to be a stand-off, then?” the Thirteenth Master demanded irritably. “The two of us will stand side-by-side for all eternity, waiting for the other to blink first?”

“Well,” the Third Doctor considered, “there are _worse_ places to stand. Unless you’re ready to make a compromise?”

“I,” the Thirteenth Master insisted, “never compromise!” And then he looked slyly off to one side. “All I need, really, is for one of you to agree. To withdraw your name from consideration. One Doctor desperate enough to…” He looked over to where the circle of Doctors and Masters still formed around the spectacle that the Tenth Doctor was creating. He spotted Missy there, having joined that crowd with her hair now down: still long on the one side, but singed off at only a few inches on the other; somehow, she still managed to rock the look. The Thirteenth Master gave her a knowing nod. She nodded back to him once in acknowledgement and pushed her way through the crowd.

The Third Doctor paled. “Just what are you plotting now?” he demanded, and moved to run over and stop her, but the Thirteenth Master stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

“You, my dear, may be intractable,” the Thirteenth Master said with a smirk, “but are all yourselves the same?”

The Third Doctor struggled against the Thirteenth Master’s grip, but the Thirteenth Master held him firmly so that all he could do was watch on in horror.

Meanwhile, Missy had shoved, kicked, stomped, umbrella-stabbed, and ball-twisted her way through the crowd to the front. There, at the centre, were the last ragged purple sparks of the Eighteenth Master. He’d managed to hold his form, such that his biodata still had half a body for the Tenth Doctor to cradle and sob over, but his left half was almost entirely missing from the shoulder on down, and the centre of his torso was burned through to a crisp, the frazzled edges of his biodata flickering slowly from existence.

“No, no, no,” the Tenth Doctor was babbling and rocking, pressing frantic kisses all over the Eighteenth Master’s cold, still forehead, “not again, never again, you _promised_ me!”

Missy licked her teeth and crouched down behind the Tenth Doctor. “Oh honey,” she clucked at him soothingly, “you didn’t believe that we could _really_ promise you forever, did you?”

The Tenth Doctor’s shoulders shook, and he clutched the Eighteenth Master’s body tighter to him.

Missy let out a long, put-upon sigh. “It is _such_ a shame, you know,” she continued to chat casually at him, “what with Rassilon changing the rules like that, letting us _die_. It’s just not fair.” She jutted out her lower lip.

“No…” the Tenth Doctor whimpered in agreement, and then suddenly he glared up at her, red-hot broken fury in his eyes. Missy flushed and drew back in response; she’d forgotten just how lovely he looked like that. “It’s _not_ fair! Why is it never fair? I just wanted to keep him, just this once, after everything we’ve been through… _Why do we always have to end like this?_ ”

A number of the Doctors – who were suddenly reminded of the exact triggers that could break their Tenth, and also how very high stakes these next few moments were – tried to intervene at that point, but their various Masters had spread themselves throughout the crowd, and now held them back. Together, the Masters watched the scene with delighted, excited held breaths, as Missy unravelled the Tenth Doctor.

“You know,” Missy said with a falsely sympathetic pout, “you’re absolutely right. It shouldn’t have to end like this! It _wouldn’t_ have to end like this, if only…well…”

“‘Well’?” the Tenth Doctor repeated sharply.

“Well, a new Matrix Lord would be able to change things back, wouldn’t they? Reverse Rassilon’s edict.” She looked down with a mock-fond nod at the Eighteenth Master’s dead face. “Save him.”

The Tenth Doctor froze, realising the delicious bit of emotional blackmail they’d set up for him.

“All we’d need,” Missy leaned in, and whispered right against his earlobe, “is for _one_ Doctor to grant us access.” She pulled back and gave him a sweet smile. “What do you say?” And then ruined the sweet smile entirely by flashing her teeth.

The Tenth Doctor gulped and brushed at the tears around his eyes and looked around him for the first time since he’d collapsed atop the Eighteenth Master’s corpse. The Doctors were obviously struggling to get to him, and the Masters were obviously trying to stop them, and Missy looked quite alarmingly over-eager, and that giant command prompt up above probably wasn’t a good thing, was it? But, on the other hand…

The Tenth Doctor took a deep breath and said in barely more than a ragged whisper. “Could you…?”

Missy blinked at him twice in quick succession, her smile growing strained. “Sorry, dearie, what was that?”

“Could you…” he repeated, a bit of conviction growing into his voice, which was rarely a good sign, “save him?”

Missy gave him an exasperated look. “Yes, of course,” she laughed, “that’s the whole point! You make us _god_ , and in return we bring back your Master. Fair trade!”

“No,” the Tenth Doctor shook his head, “I mean, could you save him _now_ , just as you are?”

Missy blinked some more. “Sorry?”

“I obviously can’t,” the Tenth Doctor was picking up steam now, his words getting faster and faster as if trying to keep up with his mind, his eyes going a bit glazed as though he were looking very far away at an overwhelming inflow of thoughts, “none of me can. We were never strong enough. Couldn’t control mind over matter, even on the best of days. But _you_! You’ve always been brilliant. You know his biodata inside and out. You’ve pieced lives back together before: look at the TARDIS! All his biodata is here still, just ripped to shreds. Actually, yes, _yes_! You _could_ bring him back, couldn’t you? If you really wanted to. No need for Matrix Lords at all.” He looked up at her with those big, brown, sad, imploring eyes.

Missy recoiled. “That’s not the deal,” she insisted. “We get to play god; you get to play cabana boy again. That’s all that’s on the table.”

“But you _could_?” the Tenth Doctor demanded.

This was the perfect time for a lovely little white lie. They worked so well on humans. However, despite the Tenth Doctor’s deceptively soppy, bovine eyes, he was still just as intelligent as the rest of the Doctors. Lovely little white lies never had worked on the Doctor, alas. “Well, yes,” Missy said, feeling a headache coming on, “if you really _want_ us to, we’ll bring him back the long, slow, painstaking way instead. All you have to do is…” She waggled her eyebrows at where her name would look so very _pretty_ up there, listed as Matrix Lord (or Lady).

The Tenth Doctor seemed to have recovered his senses now, however. “I don’t think so,” he said confidently. “I think you’re bluffing.”

“Bluffing?” Missy laughed. “Bluffing!” She looked around to all the other Masters for support. “Haha, as if we’d try to bluff you.”

“You won’t let one of your own die.”

Missy rolled her eyes. “Hate to break it to, dearie, but I was never overly fond of him. Did he ever tell you that I was actually the one to kill him in the first place? Won’t let one of my own die…” she scoffed.

A light lit up in the Tenth Doctor’s eyes then, and a little smile quirked up the edges of his lips, and Missy knew she was in trouble even before he reached out to catch hold of her wrist.

“Oh no…” she breathed in horror, because that was the expression the Doctor always got, in all their forms and variations, before they defeated her cruelly, mercilessly, without remorse.

“You’ll save him,” the Tenth Doctor informed her confidently, “because _I love him_.”

Missy’s world shattered. Somehow she’d collapsed to her knees, her legs unable to support her. There was a buzzing in her ears. Ah, yes, she must’ve heard incorrectly. That explained it. That explained everything. The Doctor would _never_ say…

“I love him,” the Tenth Doctor repeated, “and I love you, and I love _all_ of you.” He extended the last to look at all the assembled Masters, who had all frozen equally awe-struck at his words. “That is to say, all of the mes love all of the yous, no matter how much we refuse to admit it.”

 _That_ caused an uproar, but this time among the Doctor contingent.

“Good god, man!” the Third Doctor exclaimed, pulling free of the now-stunned Thirteenth Master. “Don’t just say it aloud like that!”

“Literally the one advantage we have over them!” the Twelfth Doctor sputtered.

“And you just gave it away!” The Thirteenth Doctor threw her hands up in the air in disgust.

Missy whimpered. “Say it again?” she pleaded, her voice nothing but a broken whisper.

The Tenth Doctor beamed at her. “I love you!” he said cheerily. “More importantly: _he_ loves you.” He pointed over her shoulder at the Twelfth Doctor, who was shaking his head vigorously and trying to shush his Tenth. “And I know because I’m them, and our big secret is that we’ve always loved you all along. I mean, you don’t really think we’re that incompetent that we let you escape _that_ many times?”

Missy whimpered again. If the Masters had been able to think clearly at that moment at all, they would’ve realised the fatal flaw in their plan then: in trying to turn the neediest, most desperate Doctor from the herd, they’d chosen their own neediest, most desperate. While the other Masters were certainly moved (many to complete silence), they _might_ not have done anything to foil their own plans at that point. But this was _Missy_ , and her Doctor _loved her_ , and that was all she’d wanted for ever and ever. But the Doctor was hurting and suffering, and that was unbearable because she loved him too, more than anything, more than power and godhood and all her silly little schemes and…

Before anyone could react, Missy leaned down over the Eighteenth Master. She clutched her hands on either side of his singed skull, pressed their foreheads together, and breathed the ashen holes of his biodata back into existence with all her will. The embers that had been dying on his broken edges flared back to sudden bright violet, then stitched slowly together, making him whole again, inch by inch. She shivered once, sweat breaking out upon her brow, and then the purple glow subsided, and he was returned to his full physical form once more, still looking sick and pallid but with all his limbs intact and – as the first shuttering breath from his lips revealed – very much alive.

Missy slumped to one side, and the Tenth Doctor caught her, whispering “thank you, thank you, thank you” against her ear before kissing her on the cheek. Then, she felt another body on her other side – warm and familiar and perfect – and the Twelfth Doctor pulled her from the Tenth Doctor’s arms with an impressive glare. The Tenth Doctor let her go to lay his head against one of the Eighteenth Master’s re-beating hearts, his palm over the other, a sappy smile upon his still-tear-streaked face, while the Twelfth Doctor cradled Missy under his arm and held her tightly against him, and everything was right in the world.

“I feel a bit woozy,” Missy told the Twelfth Doctor with a giddy giggle.

“Don’t try to move.”

“Don’t know why I even did that!” she laughed. “I mean, my previous is _such_ an arsehole, am I right?”

“Well,” the Twelfth Doctor’s eyes went a bit soft, “he has his moments.”

“Ha!” Missy snapped, pointing her finger up at him accusingly. “You _do_ love me!”

The Twelfth Doctor grimaced. “Please don’t make me do this…”

Missy waggled her fingernail in front of his nose.

“In front of all the others?” he pleaded, although the other Doctors and Masters were caught up in their own worlds at this point, and no one was paying much attention to anything.

“Say. It!”

“Oh, _fine_. I love you!” he grumped out irritably. “There! Are you happy now?”

“Mmm,” Missy hummed very happily indeed, and finally let herself drift off into exhaustion in his arms.

The Twelfth Doctor glanced around furtively to make sure that no one was looking, and then smiled down at her, nuzzled a kiss into what remained of her hair, and held her in her sleep.

***

“Well,” the Thirteenth Master said with an awkward cough, “my dear.”

“Er, um, yes,” the Third Doctor said equally awkwardly, a flush to his cheeks, looking anywhere but at the Master. “Well,” he finally concluded, “I suppose that settles it. It was a clever attempt by a very worthy foe, but here we are.”

The command prompt continued to hover above them, cursor blinking, prepared to wait for all of eternity for a resolution to their stalemate.

“Why don’t we just leave it at that,” the Third Doctor suggested, offering an olive branch, “and instead stop over at this quaint bistro I discovered in the Litankin Nebula? They do a lovely tea with these little cakes, and their emperor has been mind-controlling the nearby moon—”

“Oh, Doctor,” the Thirteenth Master said almost apologetically.

The Third Doctor frowned and paused mid-speech, quite a rarity.

“It seems almost uncouth to admit it now.” The Thirteenth Master lowered his eyes demurely, looking almost genuinely bashful under those lovely lashes. “But I feel that we’ve come to understand each other quite intimately over the eons.”

“Yes…” the Third Doctor agreed warily.

“So you must know that, while corrupting you into turning on yourself would’ve been the absolute icing on the cake, I wouldn’t rest my entire plan on such a longshot. You’re far too consistently self-righteous to rely upon such a risk.”

“Yes…” the Third Doctor said with growing concern.

“And, likewise, after the surprise of that little – ahem – revelation, I could very well be the better man and allow this particular contest between us to end at a draw, even though I obviously had a back-up plan in mind.”

“But…”

“But,” the Thirteenth Master agreed, “that just isn’t me, is it?”

The Third Doctor shook his head numbly.

“At the end of the day, I was always going to be the ultimate villain of this piece.”

“I wouldn’t settle for anything less,” the Third Doctor admitted.

“So, alas, Doctor,” the Thirteenth Master stepped away from him, but there was a smug smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes to indicate that perhaps he wasn’t entirely sorry after all, “I’m afraid now is the time to reveal that you never had a chance to begin with. Shall we?” He looked up to the command prompt and entered his biodata again.

The Third Doctor did so in turn, countering him.

The Thirteenth Master nodded once, with a chuckle, and reached his mind up to the crumbling remains of his mindscape telepathically, “Now, if you please?” he asked politely.

Above them, the Valeyard – in full, rightful possession of the Doctor’s biodata – countered the Third Doctor’s command. The command prompt blinked once, twice, and then read:

C:\MATRIX\system>adminlogin

New ADMIN set. Welcome to the Matrix, MASTER.

Enter commands here_   
  
---  
  
The Third Doctor’s eyes widened. “That’s cheating!” he exclaimed, affronted. “ _He_ shouldn’t count as me!” Even though, of course, the Valeyard absolutely was, in the most twisted sort of way.

The Thirteenth Master couldn’t help but laugh aloud. “Of _course_ I cheated! After all, I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. Do you see now? I win, Doctor! You lose! Enjoy _my_ Matrix!”

Full realisation struck.

“Yes,” the Thirteenth Master agreed with a deranged little quirk of his lips, “you are now _ours_ , in every way imaginable. Forever.”


	4. Defeat, from the Jaws of Victory

The Thirteenth Master closed his eyes and breathed deep. Oh, all that power felt _good_!

When he stretched his mind up to the command centre, he could feel the minds of every Time Lord in existence, at his beck and call. Most of them were insignificant things, unworthy of his attention. But there, like a shining jewel amidst the dull, tedious dregs, was the _Doctor_. The Master revelled in experiencing the Doctor in an entirely new way; he rubbed his consciousness all up and down the Doctor’s databanks like a possessive feline and felt them warm up to his touch, ready to obey his every command, whether the Doctor willed it or no.

“I beg your pardon!” the Third Doctor coughed pointedly.

The Thirteenth Master cracked open one eye, displeased. “Need you interrupt?” he asked wearily. “We were having a _moment_.”

“Yes, I’d noticed.” The Third Doctor squirmed. “Bizarre sensation, let me tell you.” He paused. “Not entirely unpleasant,” he conceded.

The Thirteenth Master licked his lips. It seemed that, despite the Doctor’s better judgement, he’d become quite hard at the Master’s proprietary stroking.

Cheeks flushed but looking every bit as unwavering as usual, the Third Doctor demanded, “And if you don’t mind, I’ve had more than enough existential threats thrown my way today, so would you kindly take a step away from my delete button? We wouldn’t want you tripping it by mistake.”

If the Master hadn’t already been hopelessly far gone all his lives, he would’ve fallen in love all over again in that instant. Even in abject defeat, the Doctor refused to be cowed. The Master _yearned_ just then, desperately. That was what he’d always wanted to be: confident and self-complete, master of himself no matter what the universe threw at him. Instead, he’d always been…well, the Doctor’s.

Now, though, that would change. Now he had the power to control the Doctor, the way the Doctor had always had power over him.

“I’m not ashamed to admit it,” the Third Doctor said, just as brazenly as before, “but I’ve always found it rather alarming when you look at me in that particular way.”

The Thirteenth Master sidled up close to him, and breathed in the Doctor’s sweet scent at the hollow of his throat. “You’re well advised to be alarmed, my dear. The things I want to do to you… Do you know that I alarm myself, some days? How much I _need_ every last bit of you.”

The Third Doctor gulped against the Master’s lips – delicious sensation! – and said, “Unusual of you to admit it aloud…”

“Isn’t it, though?” the Thirteenth Master agreed, nuzzling the Doctor’s collarbone affectionately. “You know, even up until now, I’ve noticed a surprising tendency in myself to keep the true depths of my regard for you secret, close to the chest. Lest I cede the last few remaining shreds of my dignity, I suppose.”

“Am I to gather that I should feel even more alarmed that you’re no longer keeping your secrets?” The Third Doctor had tensed beneath the Master’s cheek.

The Thirteenth Master hummed in agreement. “Oh yes,” he concluded. “You see, it’s safe now. Worst-case scenario, if I accidentally leave myself too vulnerable, I can just wipe those moments from the Matrix memory banks.” He laughed at the thought. “In fact, let’s try it: I’ve always wanted to.”

The Third Doctor took a step back, looking the Master in the eye, as if unsure whether to run or not. “Come now, my dear, I believe you’ve gone a bit power-mad. Best to wait a bit, get settled, take some time to learn the ropes before you go full Matrix Lord.”

The Thirteenth Master shook his head in disappointment. “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. You know how I hate waiting. No doubt that’s why you’ve forced me to do so very much of it over the centuries. And if you honestly believe that stalling will do you any good…” He turned abruptly from the Doctor to face his adolescent self, who was in the process of inscribing childish insults against his own Doctor in Circular Gallifreyan onto the snowball in his hands.

The adolescent Doctor was hovering not too far away, eyeing the snowball with justifiable wariness. “I knew you were up to something all this time,” the adolescent Doctor accused. “We all did.”

Indeed, the adolescent Master took that moment to validate all the Doctors’ worst suspicions by pelting his snowball directly at the adolescent Doctor’s chest.

“Hey!” the adolescent Doctor protested, and winced at the impact before brushing off the snow. However, his objection seemed to be directed more towards what the adolescent Master had written on the snowball, than anything else. “I am _not_ an ‘insufferable do-gooder’ with an ‘almost pathological fear of commitment’!”

The adolescent Master coughed in pointed disbelief. As did the Thirteenth Master. And every single other Master within earshot. In fact, it was entirely possible that, off in the distance, even though the Eighteenth Master was still unconscious and the Tenth Doctor was babbling too much doting nonsense for anything else to be heard over it, the Eighteenth Master somehow managed to cough in pointed disbelief as well. Almost as if it were a Pavlovian response.

The adolescent Master smirked and dodged the snowball the adolescent Doctor threw back at him. “The plan was so easy,” he said in a snotty sort of teenage voice that he probably thought made him sound very impressive, but just made all his older selves wince at how very young they’d once been. “I’ve just been watching. This whole time. Every single thing Rassilon’s done, I watched how he did it, learned all his control keys and commands. So now I know how to do everything. And, since I’m the first Master, that means that everything _I_ know…” He trailed off when a second snowball hit him squarely in his self-absorbed mouth.

Even the adolescent Doctor’s eyes widened in surprise that he’d actually hit, and then he immediately dashed off with a delighted “woo-hoo-hoo!” as the adolescent Master went charging furiously after him.

The Third Doctor and the Thirteenth Master watched them go with slightly pained expressions. Honestly, they handled things _so_ much more maturely now. Observe:

“What he means to say,” the Thirteenth Master said, “is that, as our past, everything he knows, the rest of us all _remember_. So, you see, we’re fully ready to step into our new role as Matrix Lord, right from the start. And the first thing we’ll be changing is _this_.” He waved one hand, and the Third Doctor’s green velvet jacket changed to the red velvet one. The ridiculous cape vanished entirely. “There. That’s far more becoming on you, wouldn’t you agree?”

The Third Doctor immediately tried to change it back, of course, but the Master could now _overrule_ him.

“Ha!” the Master crowed triumphantly.

See? Incredibly mature.

“Now,” the Thirteenth Master said with narrowed eyes, scanning about while the Third Doctor stammered out his indignation, “where’s you _Sixth_ hiding…?”

The Sixth Doctor had tried to hide, not entirely practically, behind the Seventh. Needless to say, various brightly-coloured parts were sticking out rather prominently.

The Thirteenth Master willed the Sixth Doctor’s coat from existence. And then, while he was at, the Seventh Doctor’s horrible knit vest-whatever-that-thing-was-with-the-question-marks.

“Oh, come now,” the Third Doctor stepped in to defend himselves, “this is petty even for you.”

The Thirteenth Master gave him a supercilious look. He stepped over to the Fifth Doctor instead and prodded his celery stick once, making it vanish, before sighing in despair at where even to start next with the Fifth Doctor’s ensemble. Instead he raised his finger to the Fifth Doctor’s cheek, where one of the Rassilons had burned him earlier (and while the Fifth Doctor had been defending the Master, no less). “Perhaps there are more important matters to attend to first,” he conceded, and willed the Matrix to heal the Doctors again. “The pettiness can wait.”

The Fifth Doctor let out a relieved little sigh as the burn on his face faded. He did sound so very erotic when he did that…

The Thirteenth Master pressed a quick peck to the now-unblemished skin on the Fifth Doctor’s cheek. “I think that you’ll find that I am not an entirely despotic ruler,” he announced. His passed the Fourth Doctor, snorted, but let the scarf slide for a moment: more important matters, right. “First and foremost…” He took a deep, calming breath and focused, tracking down the most egregious change Rassilon had wrought and clicking undo with extreme prejudice.

The Third Doctor let out a little surprised yelp at the sensation, as if a sudden heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders (and yet had somehow goosed him on the way out). “What did you just do?” he demanded, as ungrateful as ever.

“Reversed that unforgivable taint of mortality, with which Rassilon had infected us.” To demonstrate, the Thirteenth Master removed the air from the general vicinity of the Third Doctor’s head.

The Third Doctor’s eyes widened, and he made some fish faces, but when absolutely nothing adverse happened to him for a good, long while, he turned instead to placing his hands on his hips and scowling at the Master furiously.

The Thirteenth Master gave him back his oxygen graciously, although he made note of the fact that it was a remarkably effective way of quieting an uncooperative Doctor in the future. “You see,” he said, “I can be perfectly benevolent, when properly motivated.”

“Of all the dirty tricks!” The Third Doctor had worked himself into quite a tirade now. He looked lovely like that: cheeks flushed and burning with righteousness. “And don’t think for one moment that I believe you didn’t do it for your own benefit.” He gestured dramatically.

The Thirteenth Master turned to look at where the War Master had just yanked off the bandage around his arm with a flourish. Beneath it, the hole in his biodata had knitted up neatly, and he gave his now-whole arm a hearty pat. The War Doctor was yelling agitatedly. It seemed to be going around.

Off to the other side, Missy had grown her hair back and had pulled out a compact mirror and a variety of lethal-looking hairpins. She was tying her hair back up into an elaborate up-do, ignoring where the Twelfth Doctor was pacing in circles about her and pontificating with elaborate hand gestures.

And then, just to be contrary, the Tenth Doctor had decided that, instead of railing at the Eighteenth Master, he would rather climb fully atop him in the snow and all but smother him with kisses, if the twitches in the Eighteenth Master’s fingertips were any indication. A good thing the Master had shut off the mortality filter, indeed, or else the Eighteenth Master would have been in grave danger of being loved to death.

“For my own benefit, of course,” the Thirteenth Master agreed with a fond chuckle, as he turned back to the Third Doctor. “You are _mine_ , and I will not allow anything to harm you. _Ever_.”

The Third Doctor ran a weary hand down his face. “How do you manage to make even _that_ sound like a threat?” he asked rhetorically.

“Practice,” the Thirteenth Master answered anyway. “Now, for my second act…!” He stretched his arms up to the heavens like a circus ringmaster. Ah yes, ring _master_ , he quite liked that; he’d have to use it some day in one of his little disguises.

He reached out with his mind, searching, and heard far away in the Lumiat’s perpetually overly cheerful voice: _Over here!_ He homed in on his strangest incarnation’s telepathic signature, found the Doctor’s mindscape, and then dragged it back to where it belonged. The Lumiat made several pointed complaints about his bumpy driving and then all but slapped the steering wheel from his hands and did the rest herself.

The Thirteenth Master made a sour face and watched the Doctor’s mind incoming.

“Is our grand new Matrix Lord fighting amongst himself already?” the Third Doctor asked with some mirth.

“Be quiet,” the Master grumbled.

From below, their minds looked not unlike a conglomeration of ball magnets composed of a thick metallic sheen, as if coated in mercury. There was one large sphere in the centre – the atrium, the core of their being that remained constant throughout regenerations – and then latched onto that there were many tiny balls: one for each incarnation, representing their rooms within the larger mindscape. The combined form was more complicated than that, of course, such that only fifth-dimensional beings could properly see the full shape, but for the purposes of the current enterprise, that description was more than adequate.

As the Doctor’s mindscape approached the Master’s again, the little microbeads that formed each incarnation’s room all swivelled off to one side, the furthest away from the Master’s atrium. On the Master’s mindscape, they moved similarly but in the opposite direction, such that the two atriums – “Atria!” shouted the Tenth Doctor, but everyone ignored him, per usual – had none of the individual Doctors’ or Masters’ rooms between them.

The Doctor’s mind slowed as it approached the Master’s. The central atria bumped twice, then harder on the third try, and suddenly they joined like bubbles coming together, the two smaller atria merging to form a larger one. The individual Doctors’ and Masters’ rooms resettled around the new joint atrium, as if their minds had always been one like this.

“There!” the Thirteenth Master said with some satisfaction. “Inseparable. Better than that rickety old bridge of yours, at any rate.”

“I _did_ mean to fix that one of these eons,” the Third Doctor insisted somewhat sheepishly. “It’s just that, well, with everything…”

“Ah yes, ‘with everything’,” the Master said dryly. “I certainly never heard _that_ back on Gallifrey, day after day, decade after decade, until one day you were just _gone_.”

The Third Doctor looked genuinely worried for the first time, at that. “I say, are you…well…I mean…that is…”

The Thirteenth Master cut off his incoherent hemming and hawing. “Shall we return home now, my dear? It has, after all, been a very long day.”

The Third Doctor pursed his lips. “If you wish. Since there’s devil’s-all I can do to stop you anyway.”

The Thirteenth Master shivered. “Ooh, say that again. That was _nice_.”

“Oh, bah!” The Third Doctor threw his hands up in the air in despair, while the Thirteenth Master chuckled quite contentedly.

The next moment, the Master’s unique vision of a Christmas wonderland had vanished, and instead they were back in their proper mindscape. The atrium was double the size now, but not entirely unfamiliar. A black-and-white line ran straight down the middle. On the black side, there was the Master’s cold and tidy perfectionism, and on the white side was the chaotic mess of mechanical junk, wires, and random stacks of books and acquired knick-knacks. All the damage that Rassilon had wrought to their mindscapes earlier was healed, walls and columns restored, so that everything looked fresh and bright and new once more.

The Lumiat rose from where she’d been seated beside her TARDIS on the Doctor’s side of the mindscape all along. “There, all done,” she announced perkily.

Honestly, the Thirteenth Master sometimes despaired of his future.

“Now, about our deal?” she demanded.

The Valeyard rose from his seat among the cultured refinement of the Master’s mindscape, as if he’d been waiting for this as well. “Yes, I’ll be accepting my payment now for services rendered.”

“What are you all on about?” the Third Doctor demanded. “What deal?”

The Sixth Doctor, who’d been busy being apoplectic about his coat up until that point, now took it upon himself to be apoplectic about the Valeyard’s actions instead. He stalked right up to the Valeyard and looked down his nose at him. “If it’s anything that involves you, I can’t imagine it’s anything good.”

“Anything ‘good’?” the Valeyard scoffed. “I should hope not.”

“Go on, then, what’s the price of your betrayal?” the Sixth Doctor demanded.

“Honestly, I’d have been tempted just for the fun of the thing,” the Valeyard retorted.

The Sixth Doctor and the Valeyard looked as though they might come to blows at that, or at the very least endless snide commentary, but the Third Doctor and the Lumiat pulled them apart. Whatever the Valeyard’s reasons, the damage had been done, and the Doctors had more important matters to attend to.

“Silence, if you please,” the Thirteenth Master said with some exasperation. “This kind of delicate operation isn’t easy, you know.”

The Third Doctor managed to get the Sixth to hustle off by suggesting in his ear that perhaps the Master had forgotten to erase all the copies of his beloved coat from the TARDIS wardrobe room. (The Third Doctor certainly planned to check there later for his own back-up cloaks!) With that kerfuffle out of the way, the Third Doctor could return his full attention to disapproving of the Thirteenth Master again.

The Thirteenth Master had focused his concentration now. He sought out his and the Doctor’s databanks and located first the Lumiat’s incarnation, which tingled back at him, and then the Valeyard’s through a bit of trial and error. The Valeyard let out a sharp intake of breath when the Thirteenth Master identified him correctly amidst the other Doctors.

For a moment, the Thirteenth Master was sorely tempted to test out all his lovely new killing abilities on the Valeyard, just for the sport of it. It seemed so very wrong not to stab the Valeyard in the back, the same way the Valeyard had the Doctor.

But then the Lumiat chirped out, “Don’t even think about it!”

The Thirteenth Master nodded resignedly. He had no doubt she’d fight him bitterly if he raised a finger against the Valeyard. More interesting would be to play this hand straight, and see where the cards fell.

A few swift commands, and suddenly the databanks swapped places. The Lumiat let out a pained sound as godhood was suddenly wrenched from her, and the Valeyard let out an exalted gasp of victory.

“What’s happened?” the Third Doctor demanded, catching the Lumiat where she’d stumbled. “What have you done?”

“Exactly what the pair of them have always wanted,” the Thirteenth Master insisted. “Never let it be said that I am not generous.”

The Valeyard let out a triumphant laugh. “I can feel it! All the Matrix, pulsing and waiting for my every whim! I’m a god! Better than that: finally, at long last, I am _the Master_!”

Something clicked oddly in the back of the Third Doctor’s head in that moment. The Valeyard’s memories and experiences were no longer accessible to him, but instead there was… “Is that you?” he asked the Lumiat, who was still catching her breath beside him.

She beamed at him, even though her exhaustion. “I’ve finally done it. I’ve become you.”

“Figured it out yet, Doctor?” the Thirteenth Master asked, with a smug roll of his shoulders.

The Third Doctor sighed. “You’ve mucked about with our incarnations, haven’t you? You’ve made the Valeyard one of yours, and this lovely Time Lady one of ours.” He really should object, but the Lumiat looked so _happy_ , and she was an absolute delight to welcome into the Doctor’s ranks. And, well, he didn’t think any of him would be sad to lose the Valeyard. “I hope you know what you’re doing, giving _him_ all your powers,” he finally said resignedly.

“Better someone I can trust to betray me at every turn,” the Thirteenth Master retorted, “than the entirely baffling actions of someone trying to do the right thing.”

Indeed, by the glee in the Valeyard’s voice, he was about to go off on his own little megalomaniacal betrayal, but at that moment, the Lumiat recovered herself. She circled round behind the Thirteenth Master to snag the Valeyard by the ear. He let out an indignant squawk but otherwise let himself be led along surprisingly compliantly.

“If you don’t have any objections,” she smiled at them all, “we’ll take our leave of you. Now that I’ve got a room on the _nice_ half of our new joint mindscape.” She dragged the Valeyard straight to the bright yellow door with the smiley face, which indeed was now situated in the Doctor’s mindscape between a door covered in paisley or maybe parameciums – “Paramecia!” – and another door that seemed to have a miniature train running on sideways tracks all across it, in complete defiance of the rest of their mindscape’s gravity scheme. With a final jaunty wave, she shoved the Valeyard through her door and slammed it shut behind them.

“Such an odd Time Lady I used to become…” the Thirteenth Master said, mildly bewildered by the Lumiat’s continued existence even now, although he couldn’t exactly deny that her room stood out less as a sore thumb on the Doctor’s side.

“I still can’t believe that she used to be one of yours,” the Third Doctor said. “She’s so…”

“Don’t say it,” the Thirteenth Master winced.

“… _Pleasant_.”

“Oh, you do like to rub it in, don’t you?”

“I consider it something of a sport,” the Third Doctor admitted readily enough, an infuriating smirk upon his lips.

“You never _were_ able to admit when I was better than you at anything,” the Thirteenth Master insisted.

The Third Doctor boggled, because it really was entirely the other way around, but then the War Doctor and War Master cut through the little dramatic scene they’d set up at the centre of the new atrium.

“Ignore what _he_ ,” the War Doctor nodded gruffly in the Third Doctor’s direction, “says. Having the connection between our two minds _not_ run straight through my bedroom? Infinite improvement.” He continued to shuffle the War Master on by in the direction of the aforementioned bedroom.

The War Master seemed to be acting a bit fainter than he actually was, leaning his weight comfortably on the War Doctor and surreptitiously sniffing at the War Doctor’s hair as he went. He threw the Thirteenth Master a conspiratorial wink as they passed.

Indeed, most the Doctors and Masters seemed to be retiring to their rooms. The Tenth Doctor had scooped the Eighteenth Master up in his arms and was carrying him off bridal-style. The Thirteenth Doctor had the Twentieth Master snagged by the collar and was all but dragging him back to her room. The Twelfth Doctor and Missy were nowhere to be seen, presumably already ensconced in one of their suites.

It made a certain amount of sense: the adventure had been grand and thus the Master had streaked that phase of the scheme out across the Matrix in flying colours to fully proclaim its outrageous grandiosity. But now they were in the gloating stage; that was more intimate, sensual, private. That was part of why the Master loved the gloating best: get the Doctor alone and then drive him completely up the wall and see how long the Doctor could contain his outburst.

From the way the Third Doctor was all but shaking with pent-up agitation, his next outburst promised to be quite spectacular, indeed.

“Shall we retreat to somewhere more secluded?” the Thirteenth Master suggested with an arched eyebrow. “I’m sure my rooms would be more quiet and comfortable, so that you may lecture me at great and thorough length.”

The Doctor nodded gruffly and seemed to catch the innuendo (finally, after only a million years!) and led them to the Master’s new door.

The Master felt a tremor run through him once they were inside. The two of them had become something of figureheads for this new conjoined mind they shared. Perhaps it had all begun back on Gallifrey, and who knew if it would ever really end at all, but the Third Doctor and the Thirteenth Master had been the fulcrum. Had they not rekindled their antagonism back on Earth, who knew where either of them might have ended up? And now here they were, together, the way they had always been meant to be. The Doctor made himself entirely at home in the Master’s mind, helping himself to a glass of wine from the Master’s well-stocked sidebar, casually, as if he belonged.

“Admit it, Doctor,” the Master demanded, the two of them alone now, even as they stood at the centre of everything. “I’ve _won_. Say it!”

“I’ll say no such thing!” the Doctor scoffed, and took a casual sip from his glass. “And you most certainly have not.”

The Master couldn’t deny that a little shiver of delight ran down his spine at the Doctor’s denial. He’d faced more than his fair share of do-gooders turning his travels, but none of them had ever been half as stubborn and defiant as the Doctor. In fact, some of them had been actually _cowed_ : unworthy, undeserving annoyances that didn’t even merit the title of foe.

“You mean to defeat me, then?” the Master asked hopefully. “Some little detail I’ve neglected to notice, perhaps? A clever little trap you’ve prepared for me? Tell me, Doctor, what will you do?”

The Doctor gave the Master a smile so arrogant that the Master’s body tingled from head to toe. “Why, my dear fellow,” the Doctor said, taking another laconic sip of his wine as if he hadn’t a care in the world, “I’ve already done it, long since. Am doing it right now. Shall continue to do so forever. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?”

The Master smiled at the Doctor indulgently (and hopefully not too embarrassingly adoringly) and stepped up to him to adjust his ruffles and smooth down his velvet in a way that was both affectionate and menacing. “Now, now, my dear,” he said, continuing to brush and stroke the Doctor in every proprietary way he wished, “you cannot deny that I finally hold your very life in my hands.” Just to prove his point, he flared the destructive black light of the deletion algorithm in his palm.

The Doctor flinched from that instinctively, the way he hadn’t from the Master’s deliberately villainous petting. “There’s no need for that,” he complained. “It’s rather off-putting, in fact.”

“It’s _meant_ to be off-putting!” The Master’s calm demeanour finally snapped, and the swell of emotions that had been kept trapped beneath it came flooding out. “Now you can know what it’s like! Every time you step close, I can _feel_ it. The power you have over me, have _always_ held over me… You can destroy me with a word or a touch, and I’ve always been helpless against it. But no more. We’re _equals_ now: you can still destroy me, but I can now destroy you too. It’s only fair. After so long…it’s only fair.” His voice had turned ragged and broken at the end, and the last word came out as a barely audible rasp.

The Doctor’s expression softened at that, his brow unfurrowing and those eyes filling up with unbearable sympathy and compassion. He set down his wine glass on the end table, and then reached out and slowly circled his fingers around the Master’s wrist.

“Be careful!” the Master exclaimed, and instantly cancelled out the delete algorithm, lest the Doctor brush it by mistake. “Are you insane?”

The Doctor smiled down at him and pulled him even closer. “I think perhaps I am.”

“Idiot,” the Master buried his face in the Doctor’s chest, and felt himself actively shaking at thought of losing this most infuriating of all the Doctors, “no one should be as much in love with danger as you are.”

The Doctor stroked his hair once, which was perfectly wonderful. “I don’t know,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. “From his angle, being in love with danger looks rather appealing.”

The Master pulled back to glare up at him. “Don’t tease,” he all but growled. “Not about that.”

“Never about that, my love,” the Doctor promised fervently, and then before the Master could react, he’d tightened his grip around the back to the Master’s neck and leaned in to kiss him slow and deep.

The Master moaned pathetically into the Doctor’s mouth. His hands scrambled frantically at the Doctor’s back, trying somehow to pull him even closer. His tongue made some meagre attempt at sparring with the Doctor’s, before immediately yielding and allowing the Doctor to plunder him from within and without. Even when the Doctor’s mind probed his – in the one domain where the Master was the clear superior – he folded immediately, desperate for the contact, for the Doctor’s touch any way he could get it.

What a fool he was! No wonder the Doctor pitied him with those smugly superior eyes of his, always judging. Perhaps even hopeful at times that maybe, some day, the Master might actually be _good enough_.

“Shh, shh, shh!” The Doctor had pulled away from their kiss now and was holding the Master’s face between his palms. “Would you actually listen to me, for once in your stubborn lives?”

The Master couldn’t bear to face him just then. As usual, he’d humiliated himself completely for merely a scrap of the Doctor’s affection. He had thought that becoming Matrix Lord might have changed things, evened the score between the somehow, but…

The Doctor’s fingers came up to stroke the Master’s cheek, teasing just along the line of his goatee, and the Master practically whimpered in response. The Doctor was trying to comfort him. Belatedly, the Master realised that he still had the Doctor in his mind, and the Doctor had heard every last one of the Master’s pathetic thoughts. Stupidly, it seemed that in gaining power, he had allowed himself to slip in his self-control and had, in turn, only given the Doctor more command over him. He had been so careless. He finally pushed the Doctor back out of his mind, for all the good that it would do now that the hopeless depths of his pining had been exposed raw.

“I am afraid,” the Doctor confessed softly, intimately, a whisper hidden even within the soft confines of the Master’s rooms, “that this is one area in which I’ll never be able to match you.”

The Master’s hearts broke. He’d known it was true. He’d always loved the Doctor more, but it was still painful to hear it.

“Because, you see,” the Doctor held him tight, even when the Master tensed and tried to pull away, “I have travelled the universe. I have met countless friends, enemies, and lovers along the way. And, in all the universe, I have never found one other person who is as relentless, pig-headed, and single-minded as you are.”

The Master’s eyes widened, and he froze in his struggles within the Doctor’s arms.

The Doctor beamed down at him fondly. “You, my dear, are entirely unique. Inescapable. _No one_ loves or hates as determinedly as you do. And, frankly, that’s probably best for the survival of the universe.”

“I’m not entirely certain whether I should take that as a compliment or an insult,” the Master said.

“Both, of course,” the Doctor said. “As with everything between us.”

“It won’t work, you know,” the Master said, recovering himself enough to slip free from the Doctor’s arms. He headed for the bedroom, lazily unfastening his tie as he did so.

“What won’t work?” The Doctor followed him and frowned at where the Master casually draped his tie over one of the bedroom armchairs.

“Your little plan to defeat me. You’re going to talk your way around in circles, arguing and muddling everything to the best of your exceptional abilities, searching for a weakness to use against me,” the Master accused. One after the other, he unfastened his cufflinks and then slipped free of his jacket. He brushed the lapels once and then slung the jacket over his tie on the armchair. “You ask whether I know what you’re doing? Of course I know by now! It’s what you _do_ , Doctor.”

“Oh, is that what I’m doing? I’ll trust your expertise in this matter, since you do know me so very well,” the Doctor said lightly, and moved to remove his (now-red, ha!) velvet jacket as well.

“Ah good, you do understand where I’m headed with all this.” The Master peeled off one black leather glove, then another, and tossed them casually onto the bedside table. “I’m gratified to know that deliberately stripping isn’t overly subtle for you.”

The Doctor snorted. “I’ve known where you were headed all along. It is, after all, where we always end up when you’re given your way.” He unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke and carelessly shrugged all those sensual frills off his shoulders to pool on the floor at his feet. He stepped up to the Master then and backed him up against the edge of the bed. Eyes darkened by desire, the Doctor brushed the Master’s hands away from his own shirt buttons and undid them one by one. “I must say, you’ve outdone yourself this time. Not that your foreplay in the past hasn’t been creative, but today’s was… _exceptional_.” The Doctor’s voice sounded ragged with lust at the last.

“What makes you believe that it was all foreplay for _your_ benefit?” the Master demanded, chin held high, firm against the Doctor’s accusations. “How extremely arrogant of you.”

The Doctor chuckled and threw aside the Master’s shirt. He slid his fingers into the hair on the Master’s chest, stroking through the rough curls and rubbing them back and forth against the smooth skin underneath. “Now, now,” he teased, and suddenly shoved the Master backwards, falling atop him on the bed, “no need to play coy.”

“Who’s playing coy?” The Master gasped at being toppled so easily. There shouldn’t have been a thrill in that, but every time the Doctor did it, he felt his head spin and his knees go weak. Such a magnificent nemesis he’d earned himself!

“You,” the Doctor accused, kissing him sloppily, right on the edge of the mouth. “Constantly.” His next kiss landed on the Master’s collarbone, and the Master moaned in response. “Always.” The Doctor’s mouth moved even lower and this time brushed the soft, exposed skin of the Master’s underbelly right where the trail of hairs began that led to the prominent bulge in the Master’s trousers.

“Hypocrite…” the Master sighed. “Is this how you punish villains these days? And here I thought—ah!” Whatever retort he might have made escaped him when the Doctor took that moment to unfasten his trousers and pull his aching erection free. The Doctor licked a long, slow, deliberate swipe up the length of his cock, and…yes. That was quite effective in silencing the Master, indeed.

The Doctor chuckled at the raw expression on the Master’s face and the becoming flush on his cheeks. “A villain?” the Doctor repeated sceptically. “Is that what you are?” He mouthed the tip of the Master’s cock once, wetting it tantalisingly, before pulling away to fist it instead. He held it firmly between them as he nudged the Master’s thighs apart with his knee and crawled back up to cover the Master’s body with his own again. He seemed to have kicked off his own pants and trousers somewhere along the way. “For all that you are exceptionally skilled at orchestrating my downfall”—he pressed another quick peck to the Master’s lips, and the Master tried in vain to chase hungrily after his mouth—“you really haven’t the slightest idea how to carry through on your threats, do you?”

The Master turned from contented sigh to furious glare in a second. “How dare you?” He sniffed. “I have destroyed worlds, conquered galaxies, mastered all of—mmpf!”

The ‘mmpf’ in question was another passionate kiss. The Doctor’s tongue caught him unawares, and licked and stroked his own tongue back into sweet submission. The Doctor’s hips shifted between his legs so that the Doctor’s cock nudged teasingly against his hipbone.

The Master said “mmpf!” again, for good measure, when the Doctor finally pulled away to trail butterfly kisses along the line of his throat.

“I stand corrected,” the Doctor’s voice was warm with mirth against the rough edges of the Master’s stubble. “You truly are the Master of ‘Mmpf’.”

The Master should probably say something clever in retort to that. But he felt that he’d done more than his share of the work today, and didn’t he deserve to lie back and relax and receive the Doctor’s pleasuring?

“Villainy, however,” the Doctor continued to taunt him, “I’m afraid is less your forte. Take this latest little caper, say.” His hand slid down to catch the Master’s thigh, spreading him so that the Doctor could position his cock properly at the Master’s entrance. “Brilliant concept.” The very tip of the Doctor nudged the Master’s entrance, and the Master immediately succumbed, opening eagerly. “ _Inspired_.” The Doctor pressed inside slowly but firmly, savouring the breach and the Master stretching in increments to accommodate him, holding him snuggly. “But the climax?” The Master relaxed with a long, ragged sigh, and suddenly the Doctor slid in that final inch, locking the two them fully into place. “Needs work.”

“I killed _Rassilon_!” the Master insisted, amidst moans of anguished pleasure as the Doctor began to move gently but purposefully within him, each thrust designed to drive the Master further from the control he’d worked so hard to obtain. “I own the Matrix now. I am finally your true – ah! – Master!”

“Rubbish,” the Doctor derided this assessment not entirely unkindly. He lifted one of the Master’s legs higher about his waist so that he could deepen his angle and grind into the Master’s internal pleasure centres more intensely. “You claim to control me, to be my conqueror”—he timed his next thrust in time with that word for emphasis—“but you have proven yourself anything but.”

“I could…destroy you…” the Master panted out weakly.

“Oh, no, you couldn’t.” The Doctor rolled his hips into the Master again, and the Master’s internal muscles instinctively clenched tight around him. “And you never could. Just look at what you’ve done with your so-called ultimate power: boasted and blustered a bit and made a few quaint little menacing gestures. But, when push comes to shove, you’ve healed me, secured me, made me perhaps even more immortal than I was before. Surreptitiously moved the two of us in together permanently. Not to criticise, but it does make your death threats somewhat less intimidating when I know that you would rather die yourself than carry through.” A pause. “Not entirely different to your threats while we were alive, might I add.”

“I killed you the one time,” the Master insisted, clinging helplessly to the Doctor’s shoulders as he felt his pleasure peak.

“And premembering those future events, I can’t say that I’m entirely convinced they were even intentional. You will have a rather surprised look on your face, as I precall. Almost as if what you really crave is for me to look at you, wholly, and you alone.” The Doctor leaned down to brush their foreheads together, connecting them by that contact point also, as they strove towards their climax.

“If you don’t stop with the terrible pre- puns, I will annihilate you where you lie, love of my lives or no,” the Master warned unconvincingly. After all, he might be losing this battle, utterly and completely, but he would never agree to go _placidly_.

The Doctor laughed with delight, enjoying the challenge of a worthy foe just as much as the Master did. “Yes, well. That’s fair.” The Doctor felt the Master tremble around him then and closed in for the kill, his free hand circling the Master’s erection while he whispered tender cruelties into the Master’s ear. “But you would grow so very bored if you ever disposed of me in truth.”

“Not half as bored as you would be if you ever definitively defeated me,” the Master insisted, even though he still wasn’t entirely certain he believed it.

“ _Touché_ ,” the Doctor conceded easily. “While I may have made do without you, life – and afterlife – is infinitely more interesting with you in it.” And then he leaned in and destroyed the Master with words said so casually, so innocently, as if they were commonplace: “That’s why I love you.”

The Master came with a roar that risked shaking the Matrix to its foundations.

The Doctor came more gently, rocking into the Master’s body relentlessly the whole time, whispering fervent words of admiration and appreciation against the Master’s heated skin as he did so.

The Master could have handled the physical pleasure. He might even have stood up to the love confession, delivered to him personally at long last from the lips of most insufferably stubborn Doctor of them all. But those little murmurs of adoration and understanding were too much for him. He could disbelieve the rest, perhaps, or pretend they were a ploy, but when the Doctor said things like “thank you so much for planning all this” and “such a thrill: your schemes are always the most invigorating” and “most fun and excitement I’ve had in eons,” the Master couldn’t help but believe him.

“D-Doctor, I…” he stammered out in the aftermath, cradling the Doctor’s head against his chest where the Doctor had collapsed after his climax, and felt his chest go tight as he fought back tears in his eyes. He wanted everything then; it felt like perhaps he could _have_ everything.

“Master,” the Doctor said simply, and somewhere found the strength to raise himself up over the Master to press one last smitten kiss to the Master’s lips before rolling off to the side. The Doctor fell back onto the pillows with a contented sigh and closed his eyes.

The Master rolled with him, tucking his head contentedly into that cosy little nook between the Doctor’s chin and shoulder, nuzzling up close. His opportunity was fast fleeting now. Soon the Doctor would fall asleep, and who knew how pernickety he’d be when he awoke? If the Master wanted to strike when the Doctor was pliant and vulnerable, now was the time. All he needed was herculean bravery in the face of near-inevitable rejection.

In spite of all his other self-delusions, even he’d never been so far gone to mistake himself for brave.

“Doctor,” he said, plunging forward anyway, despite the sudden terror that wracked his mind, “I seem to have made one slight miscalculation in my masterplan.”

“Only the one?” the Doctor chuckled lightly, and gave the Master’s love handles a reassuring squeeze.

“An unconscionable sin,” the Master tried for the same light, unaffected tone, and couldn’t help but feel that it came across as a bit flat. “While being sole Lord and Master of the Matrix is my natural right,” he sent a deliberate frisson up and down the Doctor’s databanks, and savoured the shiver that earned him, “it is, perhaps, a bit lonely up at the top.”

“Ha!” the Doctor exclaimed victoriously. “You _don’t_ know what to do with yourself when you’ve won. I knew it!”

The Master snuggled against him in the most irate manner that he could, which – admittedly – was an inherent contradiction in terms. However, the alternative was _not_ snuggling, and the very thought of that was abhorrent to him now. “I may, perhaps,” he conceded, “be amenable to renewing that offer I made to you so long ago.” His fingers trailed hopeful little circles over the Doctor’s chest, admiring the strength of it, the sturdiness that endured through countless centuries and untold iterations of nefarious schemes. “Might you not consider, well…” His voice dropped to a pathetic whisper. “Ruling the Matrix beside me?” He felt an ashamed blush flush over his face and down his neck. He truly was pathetic, proposing to the Doctor like this time and time again, when he knew in his hearts of even more hearts that this was the deepest, most persistent rift between them.

The Doctor sighed, his chest rising and falling beneath the Master’s cheek. His fingers massaged the small of the Master’s back contemplatively, as if he were considering his response carefully before replying. Finally, he said with some exasperation, “What’s the point in you conquering the universe, when you always just hand half of it to me?”

“What’s the point in my conquering the universe, when you won’t share it with me?” the Master retorted evenly.

The Doctor’s lips pursed in annoyance. “Well, that begs the question: what’s the point in conquering the universe, full stop? I never was entirely clear on that point, my dear.”

“The _point_ ,” the Master said somewhat wearily, “is that it’s something that I want and you love, and we _should_ be able to share that together, if only you weren’t so stubborn.”

“ _I’m_ stubborn?” The Doctor felt a headache coming on.

A poignant silence settled between them. An unsurmountable impasse.

“You know what?” the Doctor finally said softly. “Let’s just go with it. We’re here, and Gallifrey knows that someone needs to be around to stop you from making a muddle of the Matrix, the way you do everything else.”

“Try not to be so romantic about it all,” the Master retorted with a scowl. “You’re making me blush.”

“Yes, well,” the Doctor conceded. “Point taken. I suppose the crux of the matter is… I may not have much interest in ruling any universe – Matrix or otherwise – but I have grown quite fond of what comes with it.”

The Master gaped, just a little. Had he just heard…?

“Yes, that’s a yes, you absolute fool!” the Doctor said, exasperated.

“You know,” the Master managed to somehow say despite the fact that his hearts were in grave danger of beating straight out of his chest, “I do believe that’s the most sensible thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Oh, come now,” the Doctor said impatiently, as if the Master were being the entirely ridiculous one here, “there’s no reason to be so melodramatic.” He slid his hand up to where the Master’s was still teasing him to entwine their fingers together casually over his stomach, as if he’d never done anything else.

They lay there for a moment, while the Master tried to regain his composure and the Doctor did an excellent job of pretending that he didn’t notice how close the Master was to losing it.

“This should be a bit of a lark, eh?” the Doctor babbled to cover his extreme discomfort at having agreed to commit to something. “Although I can’t imagine it won’t be deuced complicated. What happens to the Matrix when we disagree? A circumstance that I imagine will only arise a million or so times a day…”

“Then,” the Master conceded, “it will be like our little détente from earlier. If you’ll recall? Nothing can be achieved nor undone. Not until both elect to approve the change.” It sounded like an idiotic idea even as he said it. What had he been _thinking_? Why would he willingly give up absolute power like this, give up _everything_ —

“Well, then,” the Doctor said, “you’d better sign me up. Because I quite look forward to getting back to our regular afterlives. What would you stay to a quick pop down to the Champagne Pleasure Springs of the Moons of Euphines?”

—for something so much more.

The Master raised his hand and summoned the Matrix’s quaint little command prompt.

C:\MATRIX\system>adminlogin

MASTER, enter commands here: addadmin

Enter second ADMIN biodata here_   
  
---  
  
“If you will?” the Master asked roughly. It occurred to him that he was asking quite another question, and had been along.

“Let’s not stand on ceremony,” the Doctor smiled down at him, and touched his thumb to the command prompt.

C:\MATRIX\system>adminlogin

Second ADMIN set. Welcome to the Matrix, DOCTOR.

Enter both ADMIN biodata samples here for command access_  
  
---  
  
The Master let out a ragged breath. All this time, all this build up, and now it was done. They were gods. They were _equals_. “I trust,” he said, “that you’ll not tell my other selves that I’ve betrayed their trust like this, and let you in on our victory?”

The Doctor shook his head in disbelief. “Do you honestly not know?”

The Master frowned.

“ _All_ yourselves betrayed you to us. Every last one of you. As soon as you each were able, in fact,” the Doctor informed him not unkindly. “That was why we Doctors were never worried, you see. Even in your ultimate victory, you will always betray yourself, unfailingly, the way you always have and always will. It’s the reason you can never defeat me. You are your own worst enemy.”

It was true, of course, and the Master had always known that deep in their hearts. “You come in a close second,” he offered in apology, because it did seem a bit rude not to rate the Doctor at the top.

“I can’t think of a more ingenious fellow to come in second to,” the Doctor smiled at him. “In fact, it’s what I’ve always admired most about you. You’re so self-sufficient. You can be your own best friend and lover and worst enemy. I…have always needed to look elsewhere for those things. I suppose that that’s why you call yourself the Master, because you’ve mastered yourself, while I am always seeking.”

The Master let out a sharp breath. The thoughts were so similar to his own, but twisted about the other way so that the insecurities lay on the other side, in a way that he never would have thought of. He’d always believed it, known it, felt it deep as an ache in his bones, but this confirmed it once and for all: deep down, the two of them were the _same_ , two sides of the same coin, yin and yang, bonded inextricably to each other till the end of time.

“I may very well be the Master,” the Master conceded giddily, “but I am also wholly and undeniably yours.” It didn’t feel like a weakness all of a sudden, but a strength instead.

“And I remain eternally humbled by that fact,” the Doctor agreed lightly, almost playfully. “As humbled as I am by the efforts you put in day in and day out to satisfy me, as you’ve just demonstrated most thoroughly.”

The Master smiled back. “You _really_ liked the little dalliance I arranged for you today?” he asked almost shyly.

“Why, it’s the best date you’ve come up with yet!” the Doctor agreed.

“Well…” The Master lowered his eyelashes, a pleased flush to his cheeks. “I wouldn’t want our relationship to grow stale, after all.”

“You are the one person in all the universe with whom it never could,” the Doctor promised. “Now, what do you say? The Champagne Pleasure Springs of the Moons of Euphines? As I understand it, there’s a demagogue there who’s taken to preserving the denizens in a sort of amber-like substance and is using them to build an army of crystalline monsters to siphon off all energy in the universe via the quantum field. I figure we can stop by for a nice soak in the spas, catch a quick lunch, and then get ourselves into a nice spot of trouble…?”

“Oh yes,” the Master agreed, “we most certainly can. Now and forever.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, I did it! Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading along! That's it for the main plot, but there will be a quick, silly epilogue that I'll put up on Christmas.


	5. Epilogue

The Doctor frowned at the blinking command prompt. It didn’t particularly matter which Doctor, because the experience was universal to them all, so please feel free to imagine whichever you prefer.

“What, exactly,” the Doctor asked sceptically, especially after that time the Master had tricked them into agreeing to that little innocent-sounding shift to the Matrix’s temporal scheme, and then they’d accidentally lived their incarnations backwards for a good eon or two, “would the effect be if we _did_ make it Christmas in the Matrix today?”

The Master – or Mistress: again, whichever you pick – shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You’re the expert on these Earth matters. As I understand it, it would mean that more than the usual number of things will try to kill you today, and perhaps also the laws of physics are suspended for the next twenty-four hours with regard to the speed, mass, and acceleration of sleighs.”

The Doctor nodded. That sounded all right. “I am rather partial to Christmas,” the Doctor conceded, fondly remembering past homicidal attempts against their person. “Very well. Agreed.”

The two of them signed off on the command-line change, and the Matrix blipped once around them.

The Master’s shoulders relaxed, and they smiled toothily at the Doctor. “Merry Christmas,” they said, and offered the Doctor a Christmas card.

“Oh dear,” the Doctor said somewhat warily, and took it. They eyed the Master suspiciously, but got only a diabolical look in reply. Ever so cautiously, the Doctor slitted their thumbnail into the edge of the envelope and opened it.

The Doctor pulled out the card all in a rush, tensing. Surprisingly, there were no explosions.

The Doctor looked down at the card and then tilted their head quizzically to one side.

The snow and the evergreens were still there, in classical Gallifreyan stasis-cube style. So were the reindeer that shot lasers from their red noses. However, now the robins were still alive and raring to go. Rather alarmingly, because they now seemed to be wearing giant mechanised suits which also shot lasers, only theirs were green. The robins seemed to be at war with the deer, in a green-and-red laser-light Christmas show that flashed through the trees.

The Doctor tried to think of something to say to that. “I see that you fixed the dimensional transcendentalism of the ornamental fruit.” Indeed, apples hung like little red baubles from the fir branches, just as one would expect. There were also peaches and plums and apricots, which were also fine, but then also bunches of bananas and some pineapples, and one poor spruce was overladen with watermelons.

“I got rid of all the pears,” the Master said excitedly, “just for you.” They coughed pointedly. “And I remembered how unjust you found it that the robins were undefended, so I’ve armed them as well.”

“A unique solution,” the Doctor agreed, “that only you would come up with. Ever. No, really.”

“You like it, then?”

The Doctor broke out into a mad grin. “I love it!” they promised, and stole the first Christmas kiss of many. “And it’s not going to suck me into a lethal trap?”

The Master scoffed. “Suck you into a lethal trap? Of course not, don’t be silly! What would the fun be in that?” A pregnant pause. “I get to _shove_ you into the lethal trap,” they said, and promptly did so.

The Master watched the Doctor kick and flail as they fell into the winter horror-scape within the Christmas card. The Doctor landed face-first in the snow in an undignified heap, arse in the air, before scrambling wildly to one side to narrowly avoid the killer lasers. An adoring sigh escaped the Master’s lips as the Doctor broke out into a death-defying grin, tucked and rolled behind some banana-adorned firs, and pulled out their sonic screwdriver.

“Come on in!” the Doctor shouted delightedly, up into the laser-strewn sky above which they knew was the face of the Christmas card. “The trap’s just right!” They fled gleefully into a patch of hollies when a mutant destructor squirrel hopped into the banana-covered-fir they’d been beneath and started dropping peppermint bombs.

The Master hesitated. After all, this lovingly crafted trap was meant to be the Doctor’s treat. However, the ridiculous rushes of danger looked so very tempting. Maybe they could get caught in their own trap just a _little_ , so that the Doctor could save them heroically?

“C’mon, play with me!” the Doctor encouraged with a whoop, somehow slipping free of more mortal peril. “It’s more fun when you’re with me!”

Well… Somewhat abashedly, the Master dipped into their own trap, and landed with a thud in the snow beside the Doctor. “You are absolutely terrible, tempting me like this,” the Master said fondly.

The Doctor beamed at them. “The best Christmas present is one shared. And you always get me the most thoughtful gifts.”

“I do, at that,” the Master agreed, and leaned in close to whisper seductively in the Doctor’s ear. “It’s because I know what you like best,” they promised.

“No arguments there,” the Doctor agreed breathlessly, offered the Master a quick festive peck on the lips, and grabbed their hand. “Now, _run_!”

And together, hollering and laughing like the children they’d once been (and let’s face it: still half were), they fled hand-in-hand through the snow, with danger hot on their heels, just the way they _both_ liked it best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it for this fic, and thanks once again to everyone who's been reading along!
> 
> One final note about how this story came to be and where this series is going. I figure I'm allowed one shameless indulgence after writing 200K of Doctor/Master fic; plus it's Christmas! :P When I originally started writing this series ~1yr ago, I went with the idea of a Matrix-afterlife series for a number of reasons, most of which boil down to: it lets me write the things I want with minimal effort:  
> \- Can write any Doctor/Master pairing, plus multi-Doctor and/or multi-Master, without complicated plotty explanation  
> \- Can write any time/place/scenario, which is otherwise tricky for pairings like 4/Ainley and 10/Simm who have very tight timelines in the show  
> \- Maximizes humor/fluff scenarios, while making it almost impossible for the Master to do _really_ horrible things (i.e. kill people) which would cause the Doctor to break things off  
> \- Don't have to worry about explaining where the Doctor's companions are at the beginning of each story (Tegan and Nyssa can only take so many conveniently timed 6-hour walks in the cloisters, y'know?)  
> \- Can ignore continuity/cause-and-effect/linear time, or even play with it when it's fun  
> \- On a large scale, nothing will ever change, so it's a good happily-ever-after universe to play in
> 
> Or, at least, that last point _seemed_ true when I started. This was back before S11, when Gallifrey and the Matrix were safely hiding at the end of the universe, and no one had paid them any mind since then. It seemed to me back then like Chibnall was busy doing original one-off eps and wasn't interested in mucking about with Gallifrey, the Matrix, or the Master anytime soon (ha!). And then, of course, pretty much 2 weeks after I posted my first story, we got Spyfall and I facepalmed at my great hubris for ever thinking such a thing.
> 
> After Spyfall, I realized that my nothing-will-ever-change universe would have to do _something_ if I wanted to ensure that it really would never change. I noodled on it for most of S12, and by early summer I had as my head-canon that, of _course_ , the Master wouldn't be content with just living in the Matrix: with all that mucking about they'd done in the Matrix over their regenerations, they'd actually been planning to steal it all along and make themselves Matrix Lord, so it didn't matter if the Matrix back on Gallifrey blew up permanently, because this was all taking place in the Master's stolen Matrix, problem solved.
> 
> Then my only question was: did I just put this headcanon in an author's note somewhere, or did I write out a massive plotty fic explaining it? My laziness wanted the first, but I knew deep down that I wouldn't be satisfied unless I did the latter. Still, I waffled for a very long time, and it wasn't until autumn when I started putting sneak previews in the epilogues of the lead-in fics that I finally committed to actually writing this huge plotty thing that I was scared I would never finish.
> 
> That said, this is the last plotty fic I currently have planned for this series. The Timeless Child revelations surely would merit another event on a similar scale, but I don't know where Chibnall's headed with that yet and probably won't know until at least S13 is out and possibly longer. So I haven't been able to plot out my response to that; I merely have a half dozen or so potential ideas, any of which could firm up in the future, depending on how the show goes. As a result, I won't be doing anything with the Fugitive Doctor just yet, because future events will determine exactly which plot I go with.
> 
> Therefore, in the meantime, I'm going back to writing whichever light and goofy ideas float my way. I have no idea how long that will go on; at some point, I'll inevitably run out of steam, but I'm generally terrible at anticipating when that will be with my writing, so I'm not even going to try to guess. I have at least the first several fics planned out for the new year (including for the Master's upcoming 50th anniversary). However, up until now, I've tried to keep myself to a pretty regular schedule of 2 stories per month. I am sure that pattern will break down at some point, and if I try to stick to it much longer I'll burn myself out faster, so I am hereby decreeing my new schedule to be 'whenever I feel like it'. I also have a bunch of half-formed ideas, cut scenes, drabbles/ficlets, and the like that I've shelved as I've driven toward this finale. I plan to go back through and polish/revisit some of those as well, so I'll probably have more shorter stories coming out too.
> 
> Thanks, everyone for your indulgence, and especially those who have been following this series for a long time now, and we'll see what the new year will bring! :)


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